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Aegyptiaca.
Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian Renaissance

The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy1
Brian Curran
Penn State University
Herodotus, that most ancient historian, who had searched many lands and
seen, heard and read of many things, writes that the Egyptians had been the
most ancient people of which there was memory, and that they were solemn
observers of their religion if anyone was, and that they adored and
recognized their idolatrous gods under the various figures of strange and
diverse animals, and that these were fashioned in gold and silver and other
metals, and in precious stones and almost every material that was able to
receive form. And some of these images have been preserved up until our
own day, having been very much seen as manifest signs of these very
powerful and copious people, and of their very rich kings, and further from
a proper desire to prolong the memory of them for infinite centuries, and
further than this the memory of their marvelous intelligence and singular
industry and profound science of divine things, as well as human […].
Following these people, I myself can inform you that the art of good
drawing and of coloring, and of sculpture and of representation in whatever
manner, and in every manner of form, was held in great esteem [by them].
As for architecture, it should not be doubted that they were great masters,
as is still seen in the pyramids and other stupendous edifices of their art
that survive and will continue to last, as I myself believe, for infinite
centuries.
Giovanni Battista Adriani (1568) 2
1
This is a slightly revised reprint of the introduction and the sixth chapter of Brian
Curran’s book The Egyptian Renaissance, published in 2007 by University of Chicago
Press. We would like to thank kindly the publisher for the printing rights. The
illustrations are quoted as pictures according to §51 of the German “Gesetz über
Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG)”, effective
from March 1, 2018.
2
Giovanni Battista Adriani, “Lettera di M. Giovambatista di M. Marcello Adriani a M.
Giorgio Vasari nella quale brevemente si racconta i nomi e l’opere de’ più eccellenti
artefici in pittura, in bronzo ed in marmo […]”, from Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più
eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1568); in Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano
Milanesi, 2nd ed., 1:19–20 ([1906]; Florence: Sansoni, 1981):
4
Curran, Egyptian Renaissance
Who owns Egypt? It is a question that has echoed through the ages, at least since
the times when Alexander the Great and his self-styled Roman counterpart
Augustus based their claims to empire in no small part on their conquests of this
ancient land. For more than three centuries after his victory over Antony and
Cleopatra in 30 BCE, Augustus and his successors filled the city of Rome with
obelisks and other Egyptian spoils and imitations that proclaimed their
inheritance of the Egyptian legacy of sacred and “earthly” power. During the
millennium that followed, Western interest in Egypt entered a period of relative
eclipse – but it never really died out, since Egypt remained a land of consequence
for trade, pilgrimage, and crusade during these centuries. Meanwhile, in Egypt
itself, medieval Arabic scholars explained the pharaonic tradition and its
monumental legacy, and staked their own claims on the Egyptian inheritance in
ways whose impact, until recently, has been largely ignored by scholarship. 3
During the eighteenth century, intensified contact with Egypt, combined with a
series of high-profile discoveries in Rome, provided the impetus for an emerging
“Egyptian Revival” that culminated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
with the modern, “Western” discipline of Egyptology. In these years, the conflicts
attendant to colonialism and nationalism injected a new but oddly familiar
urgency to the claims of various parties – European and Egyptian alike – to the
rightful inheritance of the Egyptian legacy. 4 In recent years, disputes over this
Per quanto scrive Erodoto, antichissimo istorico, il quale cercò molto paese e
molte cose vide, e molte ne udì, e molte ne lesse; gli Egizj essere stati antichissimi
di chi si abbi memoria, e della religione, qualunche fusse la loro, solenni
osservatori; i quali li loro Iddii sotto varie figure di nuovi e diversi animali
adoravano, e quelli in oro, in argento, ed in altro metallo, ed in pietre preziose, e
quasi in ogni materia, che forma ricever potesse, rassembravano; delle quali
imagini alcune insino alli nostri giorni si sono conservate, massimamente essendo
stati, come ancora se ne vede segnali manifesti, quei popoli potentissimi e copiosi
di uomini, ed i loro re ricchissimi ed oltre a modo desiderosi di prolungare la
memoria loro per secoli infiniti; ed oltre a questo di meraviglioso ingengo e
d’industria singolare e scienza profonda, così nelle divine cose nelle umane […]
Appresso costoro mi avviso io che fosse in gran pregio l’arte del ben disegnare e del
colorire e dello scolpire e del ritrarre in qualunche maniera, ed ogni maniera di
forme; perciocchè dell’architettura non si debbe dubitare che essi non fussero gran
maestri, vedendosi di loro altre ancora le piramidi ed altri edificij stupendi, che
durano e che dureranno, come io mi penso, secoli infiniti.
3
See the important study by Okasha El-Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium;
Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (London: UCL Press, 2005).
4
See the recent studies by Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology,
Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley and
5
Aegyptiaca. Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt
legacy have been embroiled in the broader context of postcolonialism and the
“culture wars” of the later twentieth century. In 1983, Edward Said, responding
to the reopening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian galleries and an
attendant film series, neatly characterized this dispute as a battle “for the right to
depict Egypt”. 5 In the American academic world, this conflict found its most
visible expression in the often bitter debate that followed the publication of
Martin Bernal’s Black Athena in 1987. 6 These contemporary and still unresolved
conflicts must inevitably inform any attempt to consider the broader reception
history of Egypt’s ancient civilization, including the present study, in which I
shall attempt to elucidate a somewhat less familiar but no less conflicted phase in
the “afterlife” or “mnemohistory” (to borrow Jan Assmann’s term) of ancient
Egypt – the period traditionally known as the Renaissance in Italy. 7
Indeed, given this book’s somewhat provocative title, the question might
reasonably be asked: Did Egypt, or ancient Egypt, to be more precise, have a
Renaissance? 8 And if so, why and on what sort of terms might this “Renaissance”
(or afterlife, to use a more fittingly Egypt-associated term) have taken place in
Italy in the period circa 1400–1600? After all, in the long centuries that followed
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); and Fayza Haikal, “Egypt’s Past
Regenerated by Its Own People”, in Consuming Ancient Egypt, ed. Sally MacDonald and
Michael Rice, 123–38 (London: UCL Press, 2003).
5
Edward Said, “Egyptian Rites”, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 153–72
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); quotation is from p. 154. (Originally
published in The Village Voice, August 30, 1983.) The political implications of the
Western “claim to Egypt” have also been explored with considerable insight by Margaret
Melamud, “Pyramids in Las Vegas and in Outer Space: Ancient Egypt in Twentieth-
Century American Architecture and Film”, Journal of Popular Culture 34, 1 (2000): 31–
47.
6
See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols.
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987–91); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy
MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996); Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The “Black Athena”
Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1999); and Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin
Bernal Responds to His Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
7
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: Mnemohistory and the Construction of Egypt
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
8
My phrase here refers to the much-cited article by Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women
Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate
Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz, 137–64 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
6
the decline and fall of pharaonic civilization, the memory of its achievements had
never really been lost. As the acknowledged ancestor and progenitor of so many
ancient arts, and the site of many events in the sacred and secular histories of
antiquity, this “ancient” Egypt retained its grip on the imagination throughout
the Mediterranean world. For generations of visitors to (and residents of) Egypt,
the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, the obelisks of Alexandria and Heliopolis, and
the ruins of the great temples in the more remote regions of Luxor and Karnak
provided indisputable evidence for the great wealth and power of their ancient
builders.
But my title suggests something more specific and problematic. Indeed, as it turns
out, the Egyptian Renaissance that is the subject of this book has relatively little
to do with the country of Egypt as it was known and experienced in the period.
What it has everything to do with, however, is the construction of an early
modern or Renaissance culture that sought legitimacy and authority through the
appeal to antiquity. In this sense, the Egyptian Renaissance might be described as
an exercise in appropriation as defined by Robert S. Nelson, a term that provides a
more critical (but still problematic) alternative to relatively passive and
ideologically neutral terms like influence or borrowing. 9 But it must be admitted
from the outset that the Renaissance “appropriation” of Egypt was not a simple
case of reaching back to a more or less directly accessible Egyptian past.
Inevitably, given the loss of the hieroglyphic “code” and the resulting lack of
authentically Egyptian sources, the Egypt that was appealed to by the Renaissance
humanists and their associates was available to them only in “translation”, or
more specifically through the filters provided by some far from disinterested
intermediaries. Classical, biblical, and patristic literature provided the most
extensive sources of information, although these could be supplemented by
traveler’s tales, by Arabic and other less-studied textual or oral traditions, and not
least by the powerful visual testimony of the monuments themselves. As a result
of the inevitable reliance on the classical sources, there is always a hint at least of
what we now call Orientalist exoticism in the Renaissance vision of Egypt. 10 But
in contrast with the seductive appeal of nineteenth-century Egyptomania (for
more on this problematic term, see below), the Egypt of the Renaissance was
9
Robert S. Nelson, “Appropriation”, in Critical Terms in Art History, ed. Robert S.
Nelson and Richard Shiff, 116–28 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10
I refer, of course, to the vast literature engendered by Edward W. Said, Orientalism
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
7
most frequently imagined in syncretic terms as one of the more remote and
mysterious but still relatively accessible cultures of “antiquity as a whole”.
Ultimately, of course, the Egypt of the Renaissance was less a matter of revival or
appropriation than it was a renovatio – a renewal or reinvention in its own right,
a creature composed like Frankenstein’s monster from collected fragments of the
aforementioned lore but ultimately a creature with its own distinctive character
and meanings. I stress this plurality of meanings because, as will soon become
clear, the Renaissance vision of Egypt was by no means monolithic. Indeed, the
multifaceted phenomenon that I have called the Egyptian Renaissance may be
compared to the shape-shifting Egyptian king Proteus of classical mythology,
insofar as the basic mythos of Egypt – with its intimations of antiquity, mystery,
sanctity (in the form of Hermetic “revelation”), and imperial power – was flexible
enough to serve a rich diversity of patronal interests and agendas. But this very
mutability of the Egyptian legacy is, in itself, paradoxical. For as we shall see, what
the Renaissance “revivalists” admired most in the Egyptian tradition was its
promise of historical or cultural continuity – of a direct connection to ancient
sources of knowledge and power.
My use of the term Renaissance to describe the Egyptian movement of the period
deliberately invokes such familiar Egyptian themes as resurrection, rebirth, and
afterlife, themes that invoke the cursed tombs and reanimated mummies of
Hollywood lore. 11 But the Egyptologists of the Renaissance did not dream so
literally of reanimated corpses. To the extent that they thought about mummies
it was in predominantly therapeutic terms, as the practice of importing mummia
– the drug produced from the ground bodies of ancient Egyptians – flourished
throughout the period. 12 But it was in the spirit of cinematic, resurrected
Egyptians like Boris Karloff’s Imhotep that the intrepid Renaissance inscription
hunter Cyriacus of Ancona described his enterprise as an effort “to wake the
11
For mummies and mummy lore in cinema and popular culture, see Antonia Lant,
“The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Caught Egyptomania”, October 59
(Winter 1992): 87–112; reprinted in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, eds.
Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, 69–98 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1997); Renan Pollès, La Momie de Kheops a Hollywood: Généologie d’un mythe
(Paris: Amateur, 2001); and Carter Lupton, “Mummymania for the Masses: Is
Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?” in MacDonald and Rice, Consuming
Ancient Egypt, 23–46.
12
For mummia and the mummy trade during the Renaissance, see Roland Pecout, Les
Mangeurs de Momie: Des tombeaux d’Égypte aux sorciers d’Europe (Paris: P. Belfond,
1981); and Pollès, La Momie, 13–32.
8
dead”, and lead “the glorious things which were alive” in antiquity from the “dark
tomb into the light, to live once more among living men”. 13
Taking their cue from Cyriacus and his contemporaries, historians from the
nineteenth century to the present have characterized – and to a certain extent
defined – the culture of the Italian Renaissance in terms of its revival of
antiquity. 14 According to this disputed but still broadly accepted narrative, the
humanist campaign to restore the languages and literature of the ancients had its
artistic equivalent in the rediscovery and reintegration of classical form and
content in the visual arts. 15 For the most part, however, historians of Renaissance
culture have directed their attention to the rediscovery and revival of works,
13
Cyriacus of Ancona, Kyriaci Anconitani itinerarium nunc primum ex ms. cod. in lucem
erutum ex bibl. illus. clarissimique Baronis Philippi Stosch, ed. Laurentius Melius, 54–55
(Florence, 1742; reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1969); as translated by Charles Mitchell,
“Archaeology and Romance in Renaissance Italy”, in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F.
Jacob, 455–83, esp. 470 (London: Faber and Faber, 1960).
14
See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; trans. S. G. C.
Middlemore, London: Penguin Books, 1990), 120–84 (a classic discussion); and, more
recently, Paula Findlen and Kenneth Gouwens, eds., “AHR Forum: The Persistence of
the Renaissance” American Historical Review 106 (1998): 50–124.
15
For the theme of “reintegration” in the visual arts, see Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and
International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara”, trans. Peter Wortsman, in
German Essays on Art History, ed. Gert Schiff, 234–54 (New York: Continuum, 1988);
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row,
1960); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its
Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1953); Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed.
Kurt W. Forster and David Britt, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999); E. H. Gombrich, “The Style
all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation”, in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the
Renaissance 1, 122–28 (London: Phaidon, 1966); Gombrich, “From the Revival of
Letters to the Reform of the Arts” (1967), in The Heritage of Apelles: Studiesin the Art
ofthe Renaissance 3, 93–110 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976); and Luba Freeman, The Revival of
the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
9
themes, and styles rooted in the Greek and Roman traditions. 16 One by-product
of this approach has been the relative neglect of materials associated with other
ancient cultures and their post-antique equivalents – including Etruscan,
Egyptian, early Christian, Byzantine, and other works that we would now call
medieval or Renaissance in production or style, but which served in some cases as
what a recent study has characterized as “substitute” antiquities. 17 Among these
“other” antiquities, the productions of the Etruscans seem to have been most
frequently conflated with the Egyptian tradition, most often as part of a broadly
patriotic effort to argue for the primacy of local Italic cultures in relation to their
perceived rivalry with the products of classical Greece. 18
16
For archaeological culture and discoveries during the Renaissance, see Rodolfo
Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezione romane di antichita, ed.
Leonello Malvezzi Campeggi, Carlo Buzzetti, and Paolo Liverani, 7 vols. (Rome: E.
Loescher, 1902–16; rev. and illus. ed., Rome: Quasar, 1989–94); Roberto Weiss, The
Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1969; New
York: Humanities Press, 1988); and Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology
and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999).
17
For “substitution” see the recent essay by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood,
“Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”, Art Bulletin 87
(2005): 403–32, with responses by Charles Dempsey, “Historia and Anachronism in
Renaissance Art”; Michael Cole, “Nihil sub Sole Novum”; and Claire Farago, “Time Out
of Joint”, plus a “Reply” by the authors, Art Bulletin 87 (2005), 403–32.
18
For Etruscan revivals in the Renaissance, see Andre Chastel, “L’ ‘Etruscan Revival’ du
XV siecle”, Revue Archéologique I (1959): 165–80; Chastel, Art et Humanisme a Florence
au temps de Laurent le Magnifique: Etudes sur la Renaissance et I’Humanisme platonicien
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 63–71; Giovanni Cipriani, Il mito etrusco
nel Rinascimento fiorentino (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1980); Franco Borsi, ed., La fortuna
degli Etruschi, exhibition catalogue, Museo dello Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence, 1985
(Milan: Electa, 1985); Michael Vickers, “Imaginary Etruscans: Changing Perceptions of
Etruria since the Fifteenth Century”, Hephaistos 7–8 (1985–86): 153–68; Nancy
Thomson de Grummond, “Rediscovery”, in Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of
Etruscan Studies, ed. Larissa Bonfante, 18–46 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1986); Gustina Scaglia, “The Etruscology of Sienese and Florentine Artists and
Humanists: Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Sallustio Peruzzi and
Cosimo Bartoli”, Palladio 10 (1992): 21–36; and Steven S. Bule, “Etruscan Echoes in
Italian Renaissance Art”, in Etruscan Italy: Etruscan Influences on the Civilizations of
Italy from Antiquity to the Modern Era, ed. John F. Hall, 307–35, Seth and Maurine
Horne Center for the Study of Arts Scholarly Series (Provo, UT: Museum of Art,
Bingham Young University, 1996).
10
Compared to the Etruscans and the Romans, the Egyptians might be expected to
have occupied a more distant space in the conceptual landscape of the
Renaissance antiquity. But a variety of factors – historical, intellectual, and
artistic – conspired to grant the Egyptians a singular proximity and prominence.
Thanks to the extensive testimony of the ancient authors on this point, the
civilization of ancient Egypt was accepted as an influential ancestor and source
for Greek and Roman culture. The Egyptians also shared a scriptural connection
with the earliest Hebrews and other peoples of the ancient Near East.
There was also the factor of easy access to Egyptian and Egyptianizing
monuments, most notably in Rome. As noted above, during the imperial period
the Romans imported obelisks, sphinxes, and a host of other Egyptian artifacts to
the ancient capital, and also ordered the fashioning of new works in imitation of
the Egyptian ones. In this new setting, these Egyptian monuments in exile
functioned as tokens of Rome’s inheritance of pharaonic power, establishing a
precedent that later rulers – from Renaissance popes and princes to the French
and British imperialists of the nineteenth century – would embrace with equal
zeal. 19 They also provided appropriate ornaments for the sanctuaries of the
Egyptian gods, Isis and Serapis, who overcame the early resistance of the Roman
authorities to become revered protectors of the city and its empire.
By virtue of their prior appropriation by the Romans, the Egyptian monuments
of Rome could hardly fail to attract the praise of the humanists, who made the
study and renewal of the culture of antiquity the centerpiece of their own project.
For a concise and revealing expression of this admiration, we need look no
further than a prefatory letter on the arts of antiquity, published in the second
edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in 1568. The author, Giovanni
Battista Adriani – a Florentine academician and court historian of Duke Cosimo
I de’ Medici – was careful to offer a few lines to the artistic accomplishments of
the Egyptians. 20 In contrast with Vasari’s own brief references to Egyptian art,
19
For the late appropriations, see Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the
Service of French Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13–41
(on the Luxor-Place de la Concorde obelisk); and Fekri A. Hassan, “Imperialist
Appropriations of Egyptian Obelisks”, in Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon
Bonaparte: Imperialism, Colonialism, and Modern Appropriations, ed. David Jeffreys, 19–
68 (London: UCL Press, 2003).
20
For Adriani, see G. Miccoli, “Adriani, Giovanni Battista”, Dizionario Biografico degli
Italiani 1 (1960): 309.
11
Adriani’s discussion is both enthusiastic and revealing enough to provide a fitting

epigraph to this introduction. 21
Citing Herodotus, Adriani praises the piety of the Egyptians, their invention of
countless arts, and the artistic ingenuity they employed in fashioning images of
their strange and enigmatic gods. But the worthiness of the Egyptian artisans is
demonstrated above all by the survival and preservation of their works by later
peoples, most notably the Romans. And while his only named examples are the
Pyramids, which were familiar to sixteenth-century readers from both ancient
and contemporary accounts, there can be little doubt that Adriani is referring in
addition to the obelisks, statues of idolatrous gods and other monuments that
could be seen in Rome during his time. By Adriani’s day, most of these had been
recognized as Egyptian imports. And this recognition, significant in its own right,
had served only to strengthen their established status as manifest signs of Roman
antiquity and imperium.
Figure 1: Francisco de Hollanda, Allegory of the Ruin (or Decadence) of Ancient Rome
(ca. 1540–63); according to Curran, Renaissance, frontispiece
21
Vasari, Opere, ed. Milanesi, 1:215–18.
12
For a visual demonstration of the integration of Egyptian elements into the

broader fabric of Roman imperial imagery, we need only consider the evocative
Allegory of the Ruin (or Decadence) of Rome (fig. 1), devised by the Portuguese
miniaturist, writer, and self-styled disciple of Michelangelo, Francisco de
Hollanda (1517–84), for his Escorial album of “antiquities” (As antigualhas). 22
The drawing, which provides a melancholy pendant to a pendant allegory of
Rome “triumphant”, was probably composed between circa 1557 and 1563,
when Francisco prepared the album for presentation to his patron, the king of
Portugal. 23 At the center of the scene we see Roma, personified as a widow. She
wears a crown of ruins and has lowered the mirror in which she cannot recognize
herself (“Non similis sum mihi”). The figure is supported by a fallen column that
bears an inscription drawn from Jeremiah’s lament over the ruins of Jerusalem:
The Mistress of the Gentiles has been made as if a widow, and there is no one who
can console her. 24
Adding insult to injury, a pair of classical putti taunts Roma with a satyr’s mask
while a pair of winged “geniuses” (inspired by some angels in Michelangelo’s Last
Judgment) fly in from the left, carrying a marble tomb slab with the inscription
“Cognosce Te” (Know thyself). A globe and an eagle, emblems of Rome’s lost
imperium, hover over the desolate Campagna and the distant Alban Hills. 25
22
Bibl. MS A/e ij 6, fol. 4r, Escorial, Spain; see E. Tormo y Monzo, Os Desenhos das
antiqualhas que vio Francisco d’ Ollanda, pintor portugues, 1539–1540 (Madrid, 1940),
43–44; and Jose da Felicidade Alves, ed., Album dos Desenhos das Antigualhas de
Francisco de Holanda (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1989), 20–21.
23
For the character and date of the album, see J. B. Bury, “Catalogue of Francisco de
Holanda’s Writings, Drawings, Paintings and Architectural Studies”, in Two Notes on
Francisco de Holanda, 30–45, esp. 33–34 (London: The Warburg Institute, 1981); and
Sylvie Deswarte, “Rome Déchue: Décomposition d’une image de Francesco de
Hollanda”, Monuments et Mémoires publiés par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-
Lettres 71 (1990): 97–181.
24
“Facta est quasi vidua, Domina Gentium, et non est qui consoletur eam.”
25
Deswarte, “Rome Déchue”, 116–21, suggests that the airborne figures, not to mention
the reclining personification and the sphinx, could have been inspired by figures on the
Tazza Farnese, a Ptolemaic cameo in the collection of the Farnese, which Francisco could
have known well.
13
Figure 2: “Piramide di Cajo Cestio” in: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità Romane:
Divisa In Quattro Tomi (tome 3): Contenente Gli Avanzi de’ Monumenti Sepolcrali di
Roma e dell’Agro Romano (Roma: 1784), plate 44
Francisco’s allegory of Roma vidua draws on a heritage that can be traced in
Italian tradition to the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Fazio degli Uberti, whose
Dittamondo (circa 1355) provides a distant model for the figure we see here. 26
And like her predecessor in a 1447 watercolor illustration of Fazio’s poem,
Hollanda’s Roma is surrounded by monumental symbols of Rome’s faded glory.
We see the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Column of Trajan, the Aurelian
walls, and the aqueducts of the distant Campagna, as well as three Egyptian or
Egypt-inspired forms: an obelisk, a sphinx, and a pyramid embedded in the
ancient Aurelian walls. Among these, the obelisk, topped by a bronze ball and
lacking hieroglyphic inscriptions, is immediately recognizable as the guglia (or
“needle”) of the Vatican. As any well-informed observer of the time would have
known, this immense granite monolith had been brought to Rome from
Alexandria by Caligula, who erected it in his Vatican Circus in emulation of his
predecessor, Augustus. Over the centuries, the obelisk had become identified as
the tomb or monument of Julius Caesar, the Columna Julia, an association that
persisted long after the monument’s true identity had been recognized by the
26
MS ital. 81, fol. 182, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. See Weiss, Renaissance Discovery of
Classical Antiquity, 46–47; Silvia Maddalo, In Figura Romae: Immagini di Roma nel libro
mediovale (Rome: Viella, 1990), 115–20, pl. 12; and Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and
the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2, fig. 1.
14
Roman humanists. The pyramid is, of course, the tomb of Caius Cestius, a
Roman patrician of the Augustan age, whose marble-covered tomb can still be
seen, embedded in the Aurelian walls near the Porta Ostiense and the Protestant
cemetery of Rome (fig. 2). In the Middle Ages, it was identified as the tomb of
Remus, in association with a second pyramid in the Vatican that was held to be
the sepulcher of his brother, Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome.
Figure 3: Francisco de Hollanda, Sphinx of Achoris (ca. 1538–40/63),

Bibl. MS A/e ij 6, fol. 26v, Escorial, Spain; according to Curran, Renaissance, 6
Figure 4: Sphinx of Anchoris (Hakor, ca. 393-380 BC), Musée du Louvre, Paris;
according to Curran, Renaissance, 193
15
Figure 5: Sphinx of Neferites I (Nefaarud, ca. 399–393 BC). Musée du Louvre, Paris;
Given these traditional associations […] it is hardly surprising to find the

pyramid and the obelisk among the attributes of Rome’s ancient magnificence.
More unexpected, perhaps, is the sphinx, whose Egyptian identity is attested by
the pharaonic nemes headdress and characteristic paws-forward pose. The visual
sources for this figure may be traced to a variety of models. The first is the pair of
black stone sphinxes inscribed for the late Egyptian pharaohs Neferites I and
Achoris, known in Rome by 1513, by which time they were installed on the steps
of the Palazzo Senatorio on Capitoline Hill (see figs. 4 and 5). In this location,
the sphinxes acquired the status of civic antiquities and symbols of Rome. They
also attracted the attention of a number of artists and antiquarians, including
Francisco himself, whose exquisitely rendered if somewhat embellished rendition
of the Achoris sphinx appears in the same album (fig. 3).
Figure 6: Monte Cavallo/Capitoline Nile (Roman imperial),

Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome, Author photograph
16
The sphinx’s position beside the reclining Roma also invites comparison with the
supporting attributes of the Roman Nile-god statues. In 1517, the colossal Nile
from the Monte Cavallo (fig. 6) was moved to the Campidoglio along with its
mate, the Tigris. A few years earlier, the smaller but more elaborately detailed
Nile statue from the Iseum Campense had been installed in the papal statue
court at the Vatican Belvedere (fig. 7). By Francisco’s time, these creatures had
been recognized as symbols of Egypt, and by extension, of Rome’s appropriation
of Egypt’s position as the dominant civilization of the ancient world. But perhaps
more appropriately, given her shadowy countenance in the Allegory, Francisco’s
sphinx provides an appropriate signifier of the composition’s allegorical
character. For as we shall see, a long-held Renaissance (and ancient) tradition
explained the sphinx as a symbol of the “hieroglyphic mysteries” that the
Egyptians devised to conceal, and preserve, their deepest secrets for eternity.
Figure 7: Nile (Roman Imperial), Braccio Nuova, Vatican Museums, public domain
If Hollanda’s Allegory provides a compelling illustration of the integration of

Egyptian monumental imagery into the visual language of Roman antiquity in
general, there are equally compelling examples of the distinctive application of
Egyptian imagery in particular. What these ensembles reveal, at the very least, is
the surprising breadth of the archaeological recognition of Egyptian forms as a
category in their own right by the early to middle cinquecento. The most
revealing of these distinctly Egyptianizing ensembles are the illuminated
“Egyptian Page” for the Mass of Saint John the Baptist in the Missal of Cardinal
Pompeo Colonna (circa 1530–38; fig. 8) and the frontispiece for the second
book of Étienne Dupérac’s collection of drawings after the antique, the
Illustration des Fragmens Antiques (circa 1570–75; fig. 9). Produced a generation
17
apart, and for very different purposes, these remarkable compositions bring
together a selection of familiar Egyptian motifs: pyramids, hieroglyphs, sphinxes,
crocodiles, apes, animal-headed gods, “canopic” figures, and so on. And while the
broader context of both works remains Roman, it is clear in both cases that these
images have been brought together for the express reason that they are Egyptian,
and thus, we may assume, would have been recognized as such by an audience of
informed observers.
Figure 8: “Egyptian Page”; Mass of Saint John the Baptist (circa 1530–38),
Colonna Missal. Ms 32, fol. 79r, John Rylands University Library of Manchester;
according to Curran, Renaissance, plate 1
18
We cannot be certain as to the precise sequence of events or processes that

enabled this remarkable achievement, which amounts to the historical or
“aesthetic” recognition of a whole class of artifacts in Rome as foreign imports. It
had been widely assumed, of course, that many of Rome’s classical statues were
imports from Greece. The ancient authors provided extensive testimony for the
Roman taste for these works. With the exception of a few signed works, however,
it was famously difficult to determine if a given marble statue or fragment
discovered in Rome was a Greek import or a Roman original. The different
materials, iconography, and style of the Egyptian pieces seem to have made the
identification of Egyptian pieces that much easier (although the problem of
Roman imitations was relevant to this category as well). But it must be
remembered that for observers of the later Middle Ages, these distinctions were
hardly self-evident. Today, when we expect even the most casually informed art
history students to display a minimal familiarity with the characteristics of
Egyptian art, it is hard for us to understand how these monuments could ever not
have been recognized, in the most general terms, as products of a distinct artistic
tradition.
Figure 9: Francisco de Hollanda, Sphinx of Achoris (ca. 1538–40/63),

Bibl. MS A/e ij 6, fol. 26v, Escorial, Spain; according to Curran, Renaissance, 8
19
But spectators of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance were not
accustomed to making exquisite and meaningful distinctions between the artistic
products of the various ancient cultures. With the exception, perhaps, of the
more self-evidently native Etruscan and Roman artifacts (sarcophagi,
inscriptions, and so on), these monuments, and especially the statues and other
independent works of art, were admired and comprehended in the broadest
terms as “antique”. By about 1530, however, as the Colonna Egyptian Page
shows, it was possible for a more sophisticated student of ancient art to
distinguish a fairly broad spectrum of Egyptian monuments and motifs. But
despite this growing sense of antiquity’s diversity and complexity, the unified
conception of antiquity proved remarkably resilient. Familiarity with
descriptions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals that the adjective
antico/antica, when applied to a work of art, could connote a variety of divergent
(if overlapping) meaning. In the simplest sense, it served to identify a work as
“ancient” rather than “modern” (moderna), matters of particular importance to
the compilers of inventories and guidebooks. But antico also carried associations
of authenticity and value in both aesthetic and material terms: a work that was
antiquissimo (very antique) could be understood to be very authentic, very
beautiful, and very old. As a familiarity with the guidebooks and inventories of
the period reveals, the label antico was applied liberally to the full range of ancient
artifacts: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, early Christian, and even medieval.
If I have emphasized the visual and antiquarian aspects of the Egyptian
Renaissance in this introduction, I have done so in an effort to distinguish my
work from many prior investigations of the subject, which have generally
concentrated on two overriding themes: the rediscovery and influences of the
Hermetic tradition, on the one hand, and the “revival” or reinvention of the
hieroglyphs, on the other. The finest of these studies are well known to scholars
of Renaissance culture, but pride of place among them must be granted to the
earliest and, quite possibly, still the best of these efforts: Karl Giehlow’s
monumental article on the Renaissance Hieroglyphenkunde, which was published
posthumously in 1915. 27 Hugely influential in its time, Giehlow’s study
established the basis of virtually all later discussion of the subject, including the
27
Karl Giehlow, “Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in der Allegorie der
Renaissance”, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses
32 (1915): 1–229. This essential study is now available in an excellent Italian edition:
Karl Giehlow, Hieroglyphica: La conoscenza umanistica dei geroglifici nell’allegoria del
Rinascimento; Una ipotesi, ed. and trans. Maurizio Ghelardi and Susanne Müller (Turin:
Nino Aragno Editore, 2004).
20
appropriate sections in the work of his most notable successor, Erik Iversen, and
the work of a host of later scholars of emblems and Renaissance visual theory. 28
Of comparable importance is Frances Yates’s classic study, Giordano Bruno and
the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which may be considered the foundational
document for a whole field of Hermetic studies of the Renaissance. 29
It is a tribute to the intellectual and scholarly authority of these works that they
have inspired an impressive body of work in a wide variety of fields. The erudite
studies of Rudolf Wittkower and Charles Dempsey, in particular, have expanded
our understanding of the reception and re-creation of the hieroglyphs in the
visual arts. 30 Special mention should also be made of the contribution of Karl
Dannenfeldt, whose 1948 dissertation provides a still useful treatment of the
Renaissance prehistory of Egyptology. 31 Equally valuable are his articles on the
28
Ludwig Volkmann, Bilderschriften der Renaissance (Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann,
1923); Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition, rev.
ed. (Copenhagen, 1961; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Liselotte Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary Symbol (St. Louis:
Washington University Press, 1970); Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The
Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance
(Baltimore: Johns Hopk ins University Press, 1970); and Patrizia Castelli, I geroglifci e il
mito dell’Egitto nel Rinascimento (Florence: Edam, 1979).
29
Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964). Among major studies indebted to – if sometimes critical of –
Yates’s work, see Brian Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in
Early Modern Science”, in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg
and Robert S. Westman, 261–301 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and
M. J. B. Allen, “Marsilio Ficino, Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum”, in
New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought, ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton, 38–47
(London: Duckworth, 1990).
30
Rudolf Wittkower, “Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance”, in Allegory and the
Migration of Symbols (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 113–28; and Charles
Dempsey, “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies and Gentile Bellini’s ‘Saint Mark
Preaching in Alexandria’”, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and
the Occult in Early Modem Europe, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus, 342–65
(Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988).
31
Karl Dannenfeldt, “Late Renaissance Interest in the Ancient Orient” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 1948).
21
subject and his study of the textual tradition of the Corpus Hermeticum, all of
them published by 1960. 32
But despite the efforts of these and many other fine scholars, the character and
scope of the Renaissance “revival” of Egyptian antiquity has not been treated in a
systematic or comprehensive way. The visual or artistic dimension of the early
modern Ägypten-Rezeption, in particular, has been largely ignored by scholarship.
One factor in this neglect, I suspect, has been the predominance of a certain
generalizing attitude toward Egyptian revivals of whatever period that is
exemplified by the recurring concept of Egyptomania. 33 Egyptomania is a term
that, like so many in the cultural-historical realm, has its origins in an attitude of
derision or disdain. So far as I know, the earliest author to wield the term in
English was Sir John Soane (circa 1806–9). 34 Soane’s contempt for the “Egyptian
Mania” of his time appears to contradict his own much-celebrated acquisition of
the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I in 1825. 35 But his seeming change of heart may
not be too surprising if we follow the unspoken implications of the mania
discourse and accept the diagnosis of the “lure of Egypt” as a strain of exoticized
dementia. For underlying the concept of Egyptomania is a presumption that the
special appeal of this land of mysteries, mummies, and hieroglyphs is inherently
irrational, sensual, and superstitious. As a result, the seductive attractions of
Egyptomania seem to stand in distinct and disreputable contrast with the
supposedly rational appeal of classical art and culture. It may be fun, it may be
appealing in a less than healthy way; but the very notion of Egyptomania suggests
something that, when it is not to be dismissed as dangerous, is surely not to be
taken seriously by serious people.
32
See K. Dannenfeldt, “The Renaissance and Pre-Classical Civilizations”, Journal of the
History of Ideas 13 (1952): 435–49; Dannenfeldt, “Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities in
the Renaissance”, Studies in the Renaissance 6 (1959): 7–27; and Dannenfeldt,
“Hermetica Philosophica”, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval
and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, ed. F. E. Cranz, Virginia Brown,
and P. O. Kristeller, 1:137–56 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1960–2003; addenda and corrigenda, 1992).
33
For further thoughts on this theme, see B. Curran, review of Egyptomania: Egypt in
Western Art 1730–1930, by Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi, and Christiane
Ziegler, Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 739–44.
34
Sir John Soane, Lectures on Architecture, ed. Arthur T. Bolton (London: Jordon-
Gaskell, 1929), 20–21 (Lecture 1, 1806–9).
35
Peter Thornton and Helen Dorey, Sir John Soane: The Architect as Collector, 1753–
1837 (London: H. N. Abrams, 1992), 13, 59, 65.
22
One by-product of the Egyptomania concept is the continuing subordination of

Renaissance developments to later, more familiar flowerings of the “Egyptian
Taste”. It is often assumed, for example, that the “discovery” of ancient Egypt and
its artistic legacy was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, triggered in no
small part by the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 and the wave of publications
and discoveries that followed in its wake. It is true that the Napoleonic campaign
brought the full scope of the monuments of ancient Egypt to the attention of the
Western world for the first time, and set into motion the events leading to the
decipherment of hieroglyphic script and the beginnings of systematic archaeology
in Egypt. And these new discoveries inspired in turn an Egyptian Revival in the
arts, and especially in architecture, where Egyptian forms were adapted to the
prevailing neoclassical taste. 36 But as a spate of recent studies and exhibitions have
made clear, the revival of the nineteenth century represented the fulfillment of an
already vigorous Egyptian taste that had flourished in Europe and especially Italy
36
For the Napoleonic expedition and its cultural impact, see Richard G. Carrott, The
Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning, 1808–1838 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); C. C. Gillespie and M. Dewachter, eds.,
Monuments of Egypt: The Napoleonic Edition; The Complete Archaeological Plates from
“La Description de L’Egypte” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 1–29;
Jean-Marcel Humbert, L’Egyptomanie dans I’art occidental (Paris: ACR, 1989); Sergio
Donadoni, Silvio Curto, and Anna Maria Donadoni Roveri, Egypt from Myth to
Egyptology, trans. Elizabeth Poore and Francesco L. Rossi (Milan: Fabbri, 1990), 106–
44; Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi, and Christiane Ziegler, eds., Egyptomania:
Egypt in Western Art 1730–1930, exhibition catalogue, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1994
(Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994),
200–309; Jennifer Hardin, The Lure of Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs Revisited, exhibition
catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 1996 (St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1996); Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 43–116; Cathie Bryan, “Egypt in Paris:
19th Century Monuments and Motifs”, in Jean-Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price,
Imhotep Today: Egyptianizing Architecture, 183–205 (London: UCL Press, 2003); and
James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design
Motifs in the West, 203–80 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1982; 3rd ed., London:
Routledge, 2005).
23
throughout the eighteenth century. 37 The Egyptianizing creations of Piranesi,

Mengs, Antonio Asprucci, Hubert Robert, and other settecento artists, while
informed by pre-Napoleonic descriptions of the monuments in Egypt, were more
directly inspired by a series of well-publicized discoveries of Egyptian and
Egyptianizing monuments in Rome, at Hadrian’s Villa, and in Pompeii during
this period. 38 It was these discoveries that stimulated the first specialized
collections of Egyptian antiquities and the first attempts at aesthetic explanation
of Egyptian art in the writings of Piranesi, Winckelmann, and others. 39
The ancient background to the Egyptian Renaissance has also been explored,
most notably and successfully in studies of texts and literature. 40 But despite
considerable progress in the last decade or so, some of the most important art-
historical issues, such as the meaning and character of Roman Egyptianizing
sculpture, have yet to be addressed in satisfying terms. In contrast, the fascinating
story of the “obelisks in exile” in Rome and other centers has been told with
eloquence and learning by Erik Iversen, Cesare D’Onofrio, and others. 41 The best
37
See Patrick Conner, ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists,
Travellers, and Designers, 1700–1900, exhibition catalogue, Brighton Museum and
Manchester City Art Gallery, 1983 (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1983); Dirk
Syndram, Ägypten-Faszinationen: Untersuchungen zum Ägyptenbild im europäischen
Klassizismus bis 1800 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1990); Humbert, Pantazzi, and
Ziegler, Egyptomania; and Curran, review of Egyptomania, 739–44.
38
See Nikolaus Pevsner and S. Lang, “The Egyptian Revival”, Architectural Review 119
(1956), 242–54; reprinted in Studies in Art, Architecture, and Design, by Nikolaus
Pevsner (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968; subsequent citations are to this edition),
1:212–35; Pierre Arizzoli-Clementel, “Charles Percier et la Salle Egyptienne de la Villa
Borghese” in Piranèse et les Français, ed. G. Brunei, Collection Académie de France à
Rome 2, 1–32 (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1978); and Mauro de Felice, Miti ed
allegorie egizie in Campidoglio (Bologna: Patron, 1982).
39
See Rudolf Wittkower, “Piranesi and Eighteenth-Century Egyptomania”, in Studies in
the Italian Baroque (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 260–73.
40
See Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to
Alexander (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
41
For obelisks, see John Henry Parker, The Twelve Egyptian Obelisks of Rome (2nd ed,
Oxford: J. Parker; London: J. Murray, 1879); Orazio Marucchi, Gli obelischi egiziani di
Roma (Rome: E. Loescher & Co., 1898); Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Cleopatra’s Needles and
Other Egyptian Obelisks (London: Religious Tract Society, 1926); Cesare D’Onofrio, Gli
obelischi di Roma: Storia e urbanistica di una città dall’ età antica al XX secolo, 3rd ed.,
Collana di studi e testi per la storia della città di Roma, vol. 12 ([1965] Rome: Romana
società editrice, 1992); Erik Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Gad, 1968–
24
of these studies capture the powerful sense of continuity that a spectator

experiences on encountering one of these ancient stones in the center of a Roman
piazza. And the outlines, at least, of the broader history of Rome’s Egyptian
imports and other Egyptianizing works have been traced in a fundamental
catalogue by Anne Roullet and in several other studies. 42
In fairness, the concept of an Egyptian “mania” could be – and in some cases, has
been – applied to some of the more fantastic or disreputable aspects of the
Egyptian Renaissance: the mysticism of the Hermetists, Annius of Viterbo’s
dubious hieroglyphic “translations”, dynastic claims to descent from Egyptian
deities, and so on. 43 But the absence of a synthesis of the Egyptian Renaissance as
a whole has left gaping holes in our understanding of the visual response, in
particular, to Egyptian monuments and themes by Renaissance artists and their
patrons. Even in the case of a relatively familiar work like the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, discussion of context and Egyptological culture has been too often
sidelined by the unending search for the identity of its elusive author. Indeed,
until recently, the best and most reliable art-historical treatment of the
Renaissance reception of Egyptian art was to be found in an article on the
72); Labib Habachi, The Obelisks of Egypt: Skyscrapers of the Past (Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press, 1984); and Giovanni Cipriani, Gli obelischi Egizi: Politica e
Cultura nella Roma Barocca (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1993).
42
Anne Roullet, The Egyptian and Egyptianizing Monuments of Imperial Rome, Études
préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 20 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972);
Michel Malaise, Inventaire preliminaire des documents égyptiens découverts en Italie,
Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 21 (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1972); Mariette De Vos, L’egittomania in pitture e mosaici Romano-Campani della prima
età imperiale, Etudes preliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 84
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980); O. Lollio Barberi, G. Parola, and M. P. Toti, Le antichità
egiziane di Roma imperiale (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello
Stato, 1995); Boris De Rachewiltz and Anna Maria Partini, Roma Egizia: Culti, templi e
divinità egizie nella Roma Imperiale (Rome: Edizioni mediterranee, 1999); Susan Walker
and Peter Higgs, eds., Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth, exhibition catalogue
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Katja Lembke, with Cäcilia
Fluck and Günter Vittmann, Ägyptens späte Blüte: Die Römer am Nil (Mainz: Philipp
von Zabern, 2004).
43
For applications of the term and concept of Egyptomania to the Renaissance/early
modern period, see Chastel, Art et humanisme, 443; and Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La Quête
d’lsis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe; Introduction à l’égyptomanie (Paris: Olivier Perrier,
1967).
25
Egyptian Revival by Pevsner and Lang, now almost half a century old. 44 In
contrast, the reception history of Rome’s classical monuments has been
investigated in meticulous detail by generations of scholars, who have provided,
at the very least, some conceptual models for the present study. 45
The great exceptions to this overall neglect include an old and typically learned
article by Erwin Panofsky on the early modern invention of the Egyptian Deus
Canopus; some recent and groundbreaking studies by Bertrand Jaeger on Giulio
Romano’s hieroglyphic decorations at Mantua; and Helen Whitehouse on
seventeenth-century representations – and forgeries – of Egyptian antiquities. 46
44
Pevsner and Lang, “Egyptian Revival”, 218–30; and see the more recent survey by Dirk
Syndram, “Das Erbe der Pharaonen: Zur Ikonographie Ägyptens in Europa”, in Europa
und der Orient, 800–1900, exhibition catalogue, ed. Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik
Budde, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 1989 (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele; Gutersloh:
Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1989), 18–57. Rudolf Wittkower, Selected Lectures of
Rudolf Wittkower, ed. Donald Martin Reynolds, 36–126 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Donadoni, Curto, and Roveri, Egypt from Myth, 40–72; and
Anthony Grafton, in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture,
exhibition catalogue, ed. A. Grafton (Washington, DC, Library of Congress, in
association with Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,1993), 118–23, also contain useful
insights.
45
Michael Greenhalgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London: Duckworth, 1978);
Frances Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical
Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Phyllis Pray Bober
and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources,
rev. ed. ([1986] London: H. Miller, 1987); and Barkan, Unearthing the Past.
46
Erwin Panofsky, “Canopus Deus: The Iconography of a Non-Existent God”, Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 57 (1961): 193–216; Bertrand Jaeger, “L’Egitto Antico alla corte
dei Gonzaga”, in L’Egitto fuori dell’Egitto: Dalla riscoperta all’Egittologia, ed. Cristiana
Morigi Govi, Silvio Curto, and Sergio Pernigotti, 233–53 (Bologna: CLUEB, 1991);
Jaeger, “La Loggia delle Muse nel Palazzo Te e la reviviscenza dell’Egitto antico nel
Rinascimento”, in Mantova e l’antico Egitto da Giulio Romano a Giuseppe Acerbi, Atti del
Convegno di Studi, Mantova, 23–24 maggio 1992, (Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana,
Miscellanea no. 2, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1994), 21–39; Helen Whitehouse,
“Egyptology and Forgery in the Seventeenth Century”, Journal of the History of
Collections 1 (1989): 187–95; Whitehouse, “Towards a Kind of Egyptology: The
Graphic Representation of Ancient Egypt, 1587–1666”, in Documentary Culture:
Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII, Villa Spelman
colloquia, vol. 3, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, Giovanna Perini, and Francesco Solinas, 63–79
(Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1992).
26
These scholars have pointed the way to my own effort to present a more
complete examination of the reception and appropriation of Egyptian antiquities
and imagery in Renaissance visual culture, and I could not have imagined
pursuing this project without the inspiration their work has provided. It is not
insignificant that the latter two of these scholars came to the subject of Egyptian
Revival from ancient and Egyptological studies, a background I share in more
humble terms as an Egyptological “apostate” lured to the field of Renaissance art
history. One of the most forbidding challenges facing the would-be student of
this subject is the requisite command of (or at least familiarity with) a host of
diverse disciplines and knowledge systems – including, but not limited to,
Egyptology, archaeology, classics, historiography, art history, and Renaissance
studies. Only the most fearless – or foolhardy? – of scholars would dare to tread
in these dark corridors, inhabited by visionaries, charlatans, and lost souls of ages
past. I can hardly pretend to have mastered the skills necessary to bring order to
this expansive subject, but I have done my best.
This book, then, represents my own modest and inevitably incomplete attempt
to recount the story, still largely untold, of the afterlife of ancient Egypt and its
antiquities in early modern Italy, and most significantly of the impact of this
revival on the visual and antiquarian culture of the period. I have endeavored to
tell this story, as much as possible, in terms of the experiences, observations, and
decisions of actual, once-living persons, the better to give voice to Cyriacus’s
awakened dead. The past may indeed be a foreign country, as David Lowenthal
has reminded us. 47 But the people of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, like
the Egyptians and Romans before them, have left behind material traces of their
time on earth-in-the-past, and it is from these present-tense fragments – texts,
drawings, and other reflections of things that used to be – that the historian is
compelled to construct a plausible (and, it is hoped, not too misleading) image of
the past. I hope that I have not misrepresented or misunderstood too much.
In order to treat this complex material in the clearest and most accessible way, I
have organized the book into a series of more or less chronological but essentially
topical chapters. The first two chapters consider, in relatively concise form, the
survival and transmission of the memory of Egypt its monuments from antiquity
to about 1400. As we shall see, the attitudes and themes established in these
earlier traditions provided a foundation for the contemplation and interpretation
of things Egyptian in subsequent periods. Chapter 3 introduces Renaissance
47
See David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
27
developments with an account of the early humanists’ “recognition” of the

obelisks and their hieroglyphs in the first decades of the quattrocento. Chapter 4
considers the Vatican obelisk project of Pope Nicholas V along with the closely
related Egyptian “investigations” of such contemporary artists as Alberti and
Filarete, again in a more comprehensive and synthetic manner than previous
accounts. Chapter 5 examines two apparently unrelated but chronologically
simultaneous developments, the Hermetic revival of the 1460s and the much less
well-known phenomenon of the epigraphic copying and dissemination of
hieroglyphic inscriptions. The early epigraphic and archaeological interest in
hieroglyphs is perhaps the least studied aspect of the Egyptian Renaissance, and it
is a theme to which I return periodically throughout the rest of the book. The
next two chapters consider what may be the most celebrated and familiar of all
Renaissance Egyptianizing products, Pinturicchio’s Osirian frescoes in the Borgia
Apartment [the following chapter] and the Egyptological fantasies of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (chapter 7). The almost simultaneous appearance of
these works in the last decade of the quattrocento has prompted some scholars to
link them to a common Egyptianizing culture in the Rome of that period. In the
case of the Borgia frescoes, this connection is clear enough, since their imagery
owes an evident debt to the contemporary theories of Annius of Viterbo, a Borgia
associate whose researches connected his patrons to mythical Egyptian lineage. In
the case of the Hypnerotomachia, while it is evident that its (much-debated)
author and illustrator(s) had access to drawings and descriptions of Roman
monuments, I argue that this antiquarian romance is best understood as the
product of its Venetian ambience, as well as an emerging and widespread interest
in things Egyptian – including the epigraphic drawings of hieroglyphs treated in
chapter 5.
In the next several chapters, the Egyptological culture of the High Renaissance is
explored in depth. A critical reevaluation of the (supposedly) anti-Egyptian
patronage of Pope Julius II is followed by an extended consideration of the
Egyptianizing projects promoted by the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII,
which are examined alongside contemporary commissions (such as the pyramids
of the Chigi Chapel) that shared these pontiffs’ claims to imperial authority and
“divine kingship”. Chapter 10 considers the hieroglyphic studies of Pierio
Valeriano, a Medici courtier, in relation to the ongoing and expanding interest in
“archaeological” hieroglyphs among scholars and artists. The final chapter is
devoted in its entirety to a source-critical and patronage-based decipherment of
the Egyptianizing imagery of the Missal of Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a Roman
nobleman who, like the Borgia, claimed to descend from Egyptian ancestors. This
28
reading draws extensively on unedited or overlooked sources, and may contain

some of the most significant new material in this book. I conclude with a short
discussion of the afterlife of Egyptian studies from the second half of the
cinquecento to the age of Athanasius Kircher, whose vast project of translation
and compilation represents the culmination of Renaissance Egyptology.
29
Our ancestors, in order to keep always before our eyes the eternal memory of the
antiquity of our city, posted a column or tablet of alabaster on the rostra of the
former temple of Hercules, now the temple of Saint Lawrence. It is the
monument of Osiris’ triumph, inscribed with sacred Egyptian letters in the form
of birds, animals, heads and trees, about which the authors often write.
Annius of Viterbo, Antiquitates (1498) 48
Egyptian Ancestors:
Alexander VI, Pinturicchio, and Annius of Viterbo
Egyptian Idols in the Palace of the Popes

By the last decade of the fifteenth century, the status of the Egyptians as the
progenitors of a proto-Christian theology and inventors of the hieroglyphs and
other arts had become so firmly established that the appearance of a full-blown
Egyptian mythological cycle in one of the most important staterooms in the papal
residence at the Vatican may not have raised many eyebrows. Occupying a central
position in the suite of rooms on the first floor of the Vatican palace known as
the Borgia Apartment, the Sala dei Santi was frescoed by the Umbrian master
Bernardino Pinturicchio and his shop between 1493 and 1495. 49 The lunette-
48
Fra Giovanni Nanni [Annius of Viterbo], “Osiriana Aegyptia Tabula”, in Berosi
sacerdotis chaldaici, antiquitatum Italiae ac totius orbis libri quinque Commentariis
Joannis Annii Viterbensis […] (Antwerp: I aedibus Ioan. Steelsii, 1552), 380:
Maiores nostri, in templo olim Herculis, nunc divi Laurentii, ut semper ante
oculos nostros aeterna vetustatis huius urbis memoria teneretur, pro rostris posuit
columnam. i. tabulam alabastrinam. Osiriani triumphi monumentum, avibus, &
animalibus & capitibus & arboris, id est, sacris Aegyptiis literis excisam, de quibus
saepe authores scribunt.
49
For the Borgia Apartment, see Franz Ehrle and Henry Stevenson, Gli affreschi
Pinturicchio nell’Appartamento Borgia del Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano (Rome: Danesi,
1897); Corrado Ricci, Pintoricchio, His Life, Work and Time, trans. Florence Simmonds
(London: W. Heinemann; Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, 1902), 86–120; Pastor, History
of the Popes, 6:171–75; Federico Hermanin, L’Appartamento Borgia in Vaticano (Rome:
Danesi, 1934); Fritz Saxl, “The Appartamento Borgia”, in Lectures (London: Warburg
Institute, University of London, 1957), 1:174–88; D. Redig de Campos, Wanderings
among Vatican Paintings, trans. Mary E. Stanley, rev. ed. (Milan: Martello, 1973), 23–
42; J. B. Reiss, “Raphael’s Stanze and Pinturicchio’s Borgia Apartment”, Source 3 (1984):
57–67; Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns
in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 46–53;
30
shaped upper walls of the room, which served as a receiving and possible throne
room for the second Borgia pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, r. 1492–1503),
are decorated with scenes from the lives of Alexander’s selected and patron saints.
Some of these frescoes also contain allusions to Egypt and Egyptian antiquity, as
we shall see. But for the most startling images in the room, the viewer must look
up to the ceiling, whose painted and stuccoed decoration depicts, in rich and
fanciful detail, the Egyptian myths of Isis, Osiris, and the sacred bull Apis (figs. 10
and 11). As the first large-scale Egyptian mythological cycle since antiquity,
Pinturicchio’s frescoes have attracted considerable attention from scholars since
they were reopened to public view at the end of the last century. 50 As a result of
this focused and sustained attention, the primary motivation for this remarkable
cycle has long been recognized – to provide a mythological exegesis on the origins
and meaning of the Borgia family’s heraldic symbol, the ox. 51 Alexander VI seems
to have had a special affection for this creature, which appears in impressive
numbers and in a variety of scales, colors, and media throughout the decoration
Sabine Poeschel, Alexander Maximus: Das Bildprogramm des Appartamento Borgia im

Vatikan (Weimar: VDG, 1999); and Pietro and Maria Rita Silvestri, Pintoricchio (Milan:
Federico Motta Editore, 2003), 112–28, 160–89.
50
For the Sala dei Santi, see Giehlow, “Hieroglyphenkunde”, 44–46; Saxl,
“Appartamento Borgia”, 177–88; N. Randolph Parks, “On the Meaning of
Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala dei Santi’”, Art History 2 (1979): 291–317; Paola Mattiangeli,
“Annio da Viterbo ispiratore di cicli pittorici”, in Annio da Viterbo: Documenti e ricerche,
ed. Giovanni Baffoni and Paola Mattiangeli, 257–303, Contributi alia storia degli studi
etruschi e italici, vol. 1 (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1981); Claudia Cieri
Via, “Mito, allegoria e religione nell'appartamento Borgia”, in Le arti a Roma da Sisto IV
a Giulio II, ed. Anna Cavallaro, 77–104 (Rome: Bagatto, 1985); Sabine Poeschel, “Age
Itaque Alexander: Das Appartamento Borgia und die Erwartungen an Alexander VI.”,
Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 25 (1989): 129–65; and Poeschel,
Alexander Maximus, 131–81.
51
In its standard form, the Borgia arms consists of a red bull passant on a field of gold,
and is believed to reference their ancestral town of Borja in Valencia. See Peter De Roo,
Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI, His Relatives and His Time (Bruges:
Desclée/De Brouwer, 1924), 1:16–20; Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 262–63; and
Luigi Borgia, “L’araldica dei Borgia dalle origini ai primi anni del cinquecento”, in I
Borgia, exhibition catalogue, ed. Carla Alfano, Felipe Vicente, and Garín Llombart,
Fondazione Memmo, Rome (Milan: Electa, 2002), 201–13. For early recognition of the
Apis-Ox connection, see Ehrle and Stevenson, Affreschi, 68; Pastor, History of the Popes,
6:175; and Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 179–81.
31
of the Borgia rooms. The effect is perhaps most impressive in the Sala dei Santi
itself, where the ox-filled marble frieze that wraps around the four walls of the
room and the stuccoed Borgia coat of arms in the center of the vault make the
connection to the bulls in the narrative scenes evident to even the most casual
viewer. As we shall see, these heraldic and dynastic associations may be considered
both allegorical and literal. In symbolic terms, the imagery of the room provides a
visual proclamation of the virtues and aspirations of the Borgia and of Alexander
in particular as the divinely sanctioned ruler of the church. Taken more literally,
the Osiris-Apis story provides a mytho-historical justification for the Borgia
family’s claim to rule in Italy through their descent from “Egyptian” ancestors.
But before attempting a detailed analysis of this point, it is best to begin with a
brief description of the cycle as a whole.
Figure 10: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Myth of Isis and Osiris (1492–94),

North vault, Sala dei Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatcan Museum;
32
Figure 11: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Myth of Isis and Osiris (1492–94), South vault, Sala
dei Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatcan Museum; according to Curran, Renaissance, plate 6
33
As noted, the Sala dei Santi is situated at the center of the Borgia suite, on the
floor directly below the rooms decorated by Raphael for Julius II and Leo X and
known to the world as the Vatican Stanze. 52 The room takes its name from its six
lunette-shaped wall scenes, the largest and most impressive of which is
Disputation of St. Catherine of Alexandria (fig. 12), the richly ornamented fresco
that dominates the south wall. 53 Given its scale, its location, and the favorable
lighting it receives from the windows on the (north) opposite wall, there can be
little doubt that this is the most important scene in the room, which apparently
functioned as a throne room or audience chamber. 54 In the foreground, we see
the learned young princess before the throne of Maxentius. She patiently counts
her arguments on the fingers of her right hand as she systematically refutes the
arguments of the emperor’s fifty philosophers. Her principal opponent stands to
the right with his back turned to the viewer and points with his left hand to a
book that is held open by a kneeling acolyte. His colleagues to the left, right, and
center are depicted as exotically attired magi whose robes, turbans and open
books lend an appropriately “Eastern” tone to the scene that is underscored by
the improbably green and lush “Alexandrian” landscape in the background. The
center of the composition is dominated by a great triumphal arch that is
obviously modeled on the Arch of Constantine in Rome. It is richly outfitted
with multicolored marble and gold ornament and topped by a golden figure of a
bull, symbol of the Borgia and the Egyptian Apis. A frontal bull’s head also
appears on the emperor’s gilded throne, to the left. 55 These architectural elements
are not merely painted and gilded, but are modeled in stucco relief, which gives
the painted architecture a powerful effect of presence and depth. 56
52
See John Shearman, “The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration”, Proceedings of
the British Academy 58 (1972): 369–424; reprinted in Holmes, Art and Politics in
Renaissance Italy, 185–240 (subsequent references are to this edition).
53
See Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 177; Redig de Campos, Wanderings, 30–34; Parks,
“Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 291–96; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 146–60.
54
For the function and sources, see Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 295; and Poeschel,
Alexander Maximus, 80–81.
55
For these details, see Redig de Campos, Wanderings, 31–32; Parks, “Pinturicchio’s
‘Sala’”, 295–96; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 157–60.
56
Vasari, Vite, ed. Milanesi, 3:499, criticizes the technique, opining that it makes the
backgrounds appear closer than the figures. See Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian
Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 115–52, for a more appreciative discussion of Pinturicchio’s style.
34
Figure 12: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1492–

94). South vault, Sala dei Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museum,
The arch lends an appropriate air to this scene of Christian triumph. It also
probably reflects the memory of the ephemeral arches and other fantastic displays
concocted for Alexander’s coronation ceremonies in August 1492, that were
liberally outfitted with statues and paintings of the ox and other Borgia devices. 57
The inscription in gold letters below the golden bull dedicates the arch to Apis as
the Pacis Cultori (Cultivator of Peace), a notion that comes directly from
Diodorus Siculus’s explanation of the Apis bull as a symbol of the “peaceful arts”
of agriculture instituted by Osiris (and more indirectly from Alberti’s description
of the ox as a hieroglyph of peace). 58 But the motto also makes direct reference to
the Borgia pope, who was hailed on his elevation to the papal throne as a Pacis
Pater. Indeed, this same motto, Pacis Cultori, appears on a papal medal struck in
1494, that is, at about the same time that Pinturicchio’s frescoes were being
completed. 59
57
See Pastor, History of the Popes, 5:390; Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 180–81; and
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 260–61.
58
Diodorus 1.88.4; Alberti, De re aedifcatoria, 8.4; see Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 298–
99; and Poeschel, “Age Itaque Alexander”, 158.
59
Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 296, 309n29 (for the medal); and Poeschel, Alexander
Maximus, 157–66.
35
The pride of place granted to this scene of Saint Catherine probably reflects her
personal appeal to Pope Alexander. Her cult was extremely popular in this
period, having been introduced to Latin Europe during the later Middle Ages by
crusaders and other travelers to Egypt and Sinai, and her story was widely
disseminated in Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century collection, the Legenda
Aurea (The Golden Legend). 60 As an aggressive promoter of crusade, Alexander
had reason enough to grant a place of honor to this scene of Christian conversion
and triumph in an Eastern setting. 61 But there were probably some more personal
motivations as well. Prominent among these was Catherine’s association with the
city named for his greatest antique namesake, Alexander the Great. As the patron
of Alexandria and, by extension, of Alexander’s papal name, Catherine would
naturally be held in high regard by this pope, who was hailed at his election as a
“second Alexander the Great”. 62
It was in this “Alexandrian” spirit that the second Borgia pope, following the
precedent established by his uncle, Callixtus III, proclaimed the reclamation of
the Holy Land as a major goal of his papacy. 63 The Spanish origins of the Borgia
undoubtedly played a part in their passion for this cause, and it is worth noting
that the surrender of Granada to Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain took place on
the Feast of Saint Catherine, November 25, 1491, an event that the future pope
Rodrigo Borgia celebrated in appropriately Borgian terms with a bullfight. 64 In
this same crusading vein, it has been suggested that one of the two prominent
Turkish figures in the Disputation could be a portrait of the exiled Ottoman
prince Cem (or Djem), who was resident in the Vatican palace as a hostage and
60
Hermann Knust, Geschichte der Legenden der h. Katharina von Alexandrien und der h.
Maria Aegyptiaca nebst unedirten Texten (Halle a. S.: M. Niemeyer, 1890); and Jacobus
de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2:334–41.
61
For the “crusade” interpretation of this fresco and the Sala in general, see Parks,
“Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 291–317.
62
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 260–61; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 40–42,
176–81.
63
For Alexander’s policy of crusade, see Pastor, History of the Popes, 5:297–317, 6:85–
106; De Roo, Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI, 5:1–63; and Kenneth M.
Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1371), vol. 2, The Fifteenth Century, Memoirs
of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 127 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical
Society, 1978), 381–482.
64
Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 296, 310–33; and see Pastor, History of the Popes, 5:314–
15.
36
potential figurehead of a crusade at the time that the frescoes were painted. 65 This
idea is typical of earlier interpretations that attempted to identify other
protagonists in the fresco as portraits of Borgia family members, including
Lucrezia (as Catherine) and Cesare. But recent study suggests that both of these
Turkish figures are, in fact, generic types who were a standard feature in the art of
this period. 66
On the north wall across from the Disputation, Saint Sebastian is shown bound
to a column and enduring the arrows of his Roman tormentors in an evocative
ruin-filled landscape featuring an imposing view of the Colosseum and the
Palatine Hill in the background. The scene provides a visual link between the
Egyptian capital of Alexandria and its Western counterpart, Rome (Egyptian-
Roman connections are also a significant theme in the vault). On the east wall,
the scene of Susanna and the Elders is flanked by Saint Barbara’s escape from the
tower. On the west, Saint Anthony Abbott and Saint Paul the Theban, the
founders of Egyptian monasticism (and another “Egyptian” connection), break
bread in the desert. Pinturicchio devoted the lunette above the door leading to
65
For Cem, who lived in the Vatican from 1489 until shortly before his death in 1495,
see Pastor, History of the Popes, 5:297–317, 464–65; 6:85–102; and Poeschel, Alexander
Maximus, 149–55. The standing figure to the left of Saint Catherine has been accepted
as being a “probable” portrait of Prince Cem by Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 296, 309–
310n32.
66
The standing Turk on the left has been shown to be identical to a figure drawn by an
artist in the circle of Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. See J. Raby, in Circa 1492: Art in
the Age of Exploration, exhibition catalogue, ed. Jay A. Levenson, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1991), 212 (cat. no. 108). The same figure appears in Pinturicchio’s
later fresco, The Arrival of Pius II Ancona, in the Piccolomini Library, Siena (ca. 1502–
7); see Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 149–57. For more on Eastern figures and motifs in
Renaissance art, see (a select list) Hermann Goetz, “Oriental Types and Scenes in
Renaissance and Baroque Painting”, Burlington Magazine 73 (1938): 50–62, 105–15;
Julian Raby, Venice, Dürer, and the Oriental Mode: The Hans Huth Memorial Studies 1
(London: Islamic Art Productions, 1982; Distributed by Sotheby Publications, Totowa,
NJ); J. Raby, “Picturing the Levant”, in Levinson, Circa 1492, 77–81; Lisa Jardine and
Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000); and Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic
Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2002), esp. 149–70.
37
the Sala delle Arti Liberali to the Visitation, a scene from the life of the Virgin
that seems to have wandered in from the Sala dei Misteri on the other side. 67
N. Randolph Parks and Sabine Poeschel have argued persuasively that the
unifying element in these scenes is the triumph of the church and its saints over
the enemies of the faith and the protection of the church by God. 68 The Egyptian
hermits are miraculously fed by a raven; Anthony is delivered from demonic
temptation; Sebastian survives the arrows; Barbara eludes (at least temporarily)
the homicidal pursuit of her father; Susanna escapes the libidinous advances of
the Elders; and Catherine, confronted by the amassed power of Maxentius’s
philosophers, converts them one and all to the true faith. Even the relatively
peaceful scene of the Visitation is provided with an element of threat by the
inclusion of Herod’s soldiers in the background. In any case, the subject itself
alludes to divine protection through the tradition that established the Feast of
the Visitation as a day of prayer “for assistance in the struggle of the church
against her heretical foes”. 69 As we shall see, these themes of conflict, threat, and
triumph are developed further in the Egyptian mythological cycle.
Moving to the ceiling, we note that Pinturicchio has illustrated the story of Osiris
and Apis in eight scenes that correspond to the triangular spandrels of the oblong
cross vaults of the ceiling, which dates to the time of Nicholas V (figs. 10 and 11).
The artist has resolved the compositional problem posed by these alternating
vertical and horizontal fields by filling the center of each “tall” compartment with
an aedicular structure, while the horizontal panels are centered on a less imposing
candelabra motif. Like the triumphal arch in the Saint Catherine fresco, all of
these architectural elements – thrones, tombs, and shrines – are modeled in gilt
stucco relief, the better to harmonize with the ornate borders that converge on
the papal arms at the center of each vault. Within this framework, the narratives
are enacted by small, graceful figures that stand on green grounds against a deep
blue “sky”. These blue fields are decorated with a gold pattern that enhances the
shimmering, tapestrylike effect of the whole ensemble. Finally, the scenes on the
north and south vaults are separated by an arch, which is generously encrusted
with gilded stucco and also features five small octagonal panels containing scenes
from the myth of Io. 70 Moving from west to east, the panels show the seduction
67
As commented by Ricci, Pintoricchio, 103–4; see Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 292–96,
302–4; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 135–46, 160–64.
68
Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 292–96; and Poeschel, “Age Itaque Alexander”, 129–65.
69
Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 292–94.
70
See Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 181–82; and Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 280–
83.
38
of Io by Jupiter; her transformation into a cow protected by Argus; Mercury

killing Argus and freeing Io; and Io in Egypt, where she returns to human form as
Isis and teaches laws and letters to the Egyptians. 71 As this description shows,
these scenes may be understood as a kind of Isiac prologue to the events in the
vault, which relate the further events in the story of Isis and her husband after her
arrival in Egypt.
Figure 13: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Osiris Teaching the Egyptians to Gather Fruit
(1492–94), Sala dei Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museums;
71
Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 182, proposes that the youthful figure to the left of Isis is
Moses; and Yates, Giordano Bruno, 116, identifies the bearded figure on the right as
Hermes Trismegistus. These identifications are accepted by Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”
310n37; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 165; but the lack of inscriptions or
identifying attributes renders any identification speculative.
39
Figure 14: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Osiris Teaching the Use of the Plow (1492-94), detail,
Sala dei Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museums;
The Osiris narrative begins on the northern vault (fig. 10), which features four
scenes representing Isis and Osiris’s actions as benefactors of mankind and
“cultivators of peace”. The cycle begins on the inside or northern horizontal
spandrel with the marriage of Isis and Osiris. This is followed by two vertical
scenes of the enthroned Osiris teaching the Egyptians to gather fruits from the
trees (fig. 13) and cultivate the earth with the ox-driven plow (fig. 14). In the
final horizontal compartment, we see Osiris teaching the Egyptians to cultivate
the vine (fig. 10). Inscriptions on the thronebases in the taller scenes describe the
action:
40
LEGERE POMA AB ARBORIBUS DOCUIT

[He taught them to gather fruit from the trees]
SUSCEPTO REGNO DOCUIT EGIPTIACOS ARARE E(T) PRO DEO

HABITUS
[After assuming the throne, he taught them to cultivate the earth with the plow,
and he was regarded as if he was a god by the Egyptians]. 72
The scene with the ox-driven plow provides a direct link to the Pacis Cultori
theme from the Saint Catherine panel, and is even more directly inspired by
Diodorus’s explanation of the Apis cult as a memorial to Osiris’s invention of
agriculture:
The consecration to Osiris, however, of the sacred bulls, which are given the
names Apis and Mnevis, and the worship of them as gods were introduced
generally among all the Egyptians, since these animals had, more than any others,
rendered aid to those who discovered the fruit of the grain, in connection with
both the sowing of the seed and with every agricultural labor from which mankind
profits. 73
In a twist that has so far attracted little attention, this “Egyptian” scene also
alludes directly to the mythical foundations of Rome. For, according to the
tradition laid out by the Roman historians and poets, Romulus laid out the sacred
boundaries of his new city with a plow driven by an ox and cow. As Plutarch put
it in his Life of Romulus:
And the founder (Romulus) put a bronze blade on his plough, yoked up a bull and
a cow, and himself drove them on, drawing a deep furrow around the boundary [...]
It was with this line that they marked out the course of the wall, and it was called
72
For these inscriptions, see Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 286–90; Parks,
“Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297–99; 310–13 (notes); and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus,
170–71.
73
Diodorus 1.21.10–11; Diodorus, ed. Oldfeather, 1:69. Diodorus returns to this theme
in 1.88.4.
41
the pomerium, a contracted form of “post-murum”, “behind” or “next to the

wall”. 74
The scene’s correspondence to the Romulan episode is not exact. For example,
some of the ancient sources describe Romulus’s ox and cow as pure white in color,
which contrasts rather sharply with the brown and beige-white creatures in
Pinturicchio’s fresco. 75 But the general resemblance could hardly have been lost
on contemporary spectators. As early as 1438, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus had
been translated into Latin by Giovanni Tortelli, a humanist who went on to serve
as an advisor to Nicholas V in the foundation of the Vatican Library. 76 But
Tortelli was only one of a host of quattrocento humanists who devoted intensive
study to the problem of Rome’s Romulan foundations. 77 Indeed, the connection
between the Borgia ox and the instrument of Rome’s foundation had already
been proclaimed by an inscription on the base of an ephemeral golden ox
fashioned for Alexander’s coronation in 1492:
ROMA BOVEM INVENIT TUNC CUM FUNDATUR ARATRO.
ET NUNC LAPSA SUO EST RENATA BOVE.
[Rome had discovered the ox when she was founded with the ploughshare. Now
in decay she is reborn through her ox.] 78
It is interesting to note, as we prepare to consider the very different tone of the
scenes on the second vault, that there are no direct representations of Osiris in his
role as a commander and conqueror on any part of the Borgia vault. The only
allusions to his military exploits are the discarded pieces of armor and weapons
that appear in the marriage scene, although an appropriately triumphal and
martial note is struck by the acroterial figures of the Old Testament heroes that
74
Plutarch Romulus 11.14; translation from Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price,
eds., Religions of Rome, vol. 2, A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 94.
75
Ovid Fasti 4.807–62. For more sources and discussion, see Hans Joachim Kramer,
“Die Sage von Romulus und Remus in der lateinischen Literatur”, in Synusia: Festgabe
für Wolfgang Schadewaldt zum 15. März 1965, ed. H. Flashar and K. Gaiser, 355–402
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1965); and J. N. Bremmer, “Romulus, Remus and the Foundation of
Rome“, in Roman Myth and Mythography, by J. N. Bremmer and N. M. Horsfall, 25–48,
Bulletin Supplement/University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, no. 52
(London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 1987).
76
Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 155.
77
See ibid., 125–74, for extensive discussion.
78
Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 181n8.
42
surmount the throne canopies in the vertical cultivation scenes. In the fruit-
gathering scene, Osiris’s throne is topped by a figure of David, who holds his sling
and rests his right foot on the head of his fallen opponent, Goliath. In the ox-and-
plow panel, this place is occupied by Judith, who holds a sword and the head of
Holofernes. A small panel at her feet is inscribed with the letters SPQR, an
unmistakable reference to the city of Rome that makes the previously proposed
Romulus reference seem all the more plausible. 79
Figure 15: Bernardino Pinturicchio, The Burial of Osiris (1492–94), detail, Sala dei
Santi, Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museums; according to Curran, Renaissance, 114
On the southern vault (fig. 11), the Osiris story takes a violent turn with a series
of scenes that might be described as an Egyptian “passion cycle”. In the first
79
For various interpretations of these figures, see Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 298,
312n143; Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 287–89; and Poeschel, “Age Itaque
Alexander”, 155–56.
43
compartment, Osiris is murdered and dismembered by his jealous brother,

Typhon. Isis gathers his dispersed limbs for burial in an aedicular pyramid-tomb
topped by a statue of Neptune, a son of Osiris, according to one significant
source (fig. 15). 80 The tomb is inscribed
UXOR EIUS ME(M)BRA DISCERPTA TANDEM INVENIT QUIBUS
SEPULCHRUM CONSTITUIT
[At last his wife discovered his dismembered limbs for which she set up this
tomb]. 81
Figure 16: Bernardino Pinturicchio, The Appearance of Apis (1492–94), Sala dei Santi,
Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museums; according to Curran, Renaissance, 114
In the next scene, Apis, the living reincarnation of Osiris and physical reminder
of his civilizing legacy, appears before a group of worshippers at Osiris’s pyramid-
tomb (fig. 16). Apis’s softly striped, black and white markings approximate
80
Neptune was described as a son of Osiris by Annius of Viterbo; see Mattiangeli,
“Annio da Viterbo”, 293. Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 298, 312n43, identifies this figure
as Theseus, but this is not convincing.
81
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 293; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 171.
44
descriptions given by the ancient authors. 82 His head and body are ornamented
with a beaded mantle or garlands, and he wears a sacrificial belt, or dorsuale, of the
type worn by bulls in scenes of Roman animal sacrifice. 83 Similar belts appear on
the bulls in the marble frieze below, as well as on some frescoed bulls in the Sala
delle Sibille elsewhere in the Apartment; the latter stand on inscriptions of
Alexander VI (A.PM.VI) and carry putti that hold the double-crown impresa
above their heads. 84 The sacrificial altar with a burning flame on the right
provides a further reference to Roman sacrifice. According to Livy, the sacrifice of
bulls had been instituted soon after the foundation of Rome by Romulus, who
sacrificed an ox to Hercules in emulation of a practice instituted many years
earlier by Evander. As the story goes, Evander had chosen the ox to commemorate
Hercules’ victory over the cattle-rustling giant Cacus, who had stolen some of the
cattle of Geryon and taken them to his cave on the Aventine. 85 It is easy to
imagine that this story would have appealed to Pope Alexander, who claimed to
descend from Osiris via his heroic son, the “Egyptian Hercules” – a theme we
shall explore at length below.
As if to underline this point, Hercules appears prominently in the final scene on
the vault, as the acroterial figure on a portable shrine of Apis (fig. 17). The figure
of the living god had been replaced on this shrine by a golden statue, rendered in
gilt-stucco relief, and the whole apparatus is carried by a group of youthful
worshippers. As Fritz Saxl observed, the young boy blowing an oliphant horn at
the head of the procession is marked with the device of the double crown, an
82
Herodotus 3.27–30; and Strabo 17.1.33, describe the bull as black with white
markings, but as Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 314, points out, Pinturicchio’s bull
corresponds most closely to the coloring as described by Plutarch De Iside et Osiride
368 (c), who describes Apis’s markings as bright shaded into dark. It is also possible that
the radiant effect was inspired by a passage in Macrobius Saturnalia 1.21.18–21.
83
The sacrificial belt is noted by Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 184, in relation to the
bulls in the marble frieze below. By the late fifteenth century, an animal of this type
could be seen in a relief of a Suovetaurilia procession in the collection of Cardinal
Domenico Grimani at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome (now in the Louvre). See Bober and
Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, 223 (cat. no. 190). For more examples, see I. Scott
Ryberg, The Rites of the State Religion in Roman Art, Memoirs of the American Academy
in Rome 22 (Rome: Tipografia del Senato del Dott. G. Bardi, 1955), 8–9, 30–31, 104–
19; and Jean Prieur, Les animaux sacrés dans l’antiquité: Art et religion du monde
méditerranéen (Rennes: Ouest-France, Université, 1988), 176–83.
84
See Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 302–3, plate 16.
85
Livy 1.6–7.
45
impresa that declares the Borgia family’s claim of kinship to the royal house of
Aragon. 86 The base bears the inscription
SACRA NO(N) PRIUS INITIABANT Q(UAM) POPULO OS(T)ENSUM
BOVEM ASCENDERENT
[They did not begin the sacred rites before they went up in order to display the
bull to the people]. 87
Figure 17: Bernardino Pinturicchio, The Procession of Apis (1492–94), Sala dei Santi,
Borgia Apartment, Vatican Museums; according to Curran, Renaissance, 116
86
Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 178–179, 83; and Mattiangeli, ”Annio da Viterbo”, 263.
For the history of this device, see Albert Van de Put, The Aragonese Double Crown and
the Borja or Borgia Device, with notes upon the bearing of such insignia in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries (London: Gryphon Club, Bernard Quaritch, 1910).
87
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 294; and Poeschel, Alexander Maximus, 171.
46
On the pediment of the shrine stands a figure of the Borgia ancestor Hercules,
who is clearly identified by his club and lion skin. With this final flourish, the
Borgia claim to descent from Osiris-Apis is established through their connection
to this hero – who was also, according to the most likely contemporary source,
Osiris’s son and the avenger of his murder. 88
Figure 18: Male sphinx, Lateran Cloister, Rome (ca. 1215-32), public domain.
Figure 19: Filarete: Crucifixion of St. Peter (completed 1445). Porta Argentea,
St. Peters Basilica; according to Curran, Renaissance, 69
88
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 294–95; and Poeschel, “Age Itaque Alexander”, 156–
60.
47
Although Pinturicchio’s frescoes treat such potentially disturbing themes as

fratricide and dismemberment, the overall tone is one of poetic fantasy and
courtly pageant. The distinctive golden thrones and tombs, although richly
furnished with sphinxes and other antiquarian bric-a-brac, are closer in form to
contemporary altars and reliquaries than they are to anything identifiably
“ancient”. The few Egyptianizing elements that do appear seem to have been
inspired not by the “authentic” monuments that could be seen in Rome, but by
Roman and medieval imitations. The most conspicuous of these is the pair of
bearded, nemes-wearing sphinxes that support Osiris’s throne in the fruit-
gathering scene (fig. 13). The closest model for these figures is the bearded male
sphinx from the Vasalletto cloister at the Lateran (fig. 18) – an appropriately
papal provenance to be sure. How much these figures were intended to be read as
specifically “Egyptian” versions of this creature is almost impossible to know.
Perhaps Pinturicchio knew the Egyptian sphinxes that were recorded on the
Capitoline Hill in the time of Leo X (figs. 4 and 5). And he was certainly familiar
with the nemes-wearing creature from the Monte Cavallo Nile colossus (fig. 7),
which he copied quite accurately in his frescoes for the Palazzo of Giuliano della
Rovere at SS. Apostoli (circa 1492–94). 89 It is not impossible that the Egyptian
origins of this headgear had been recognized by this time. As we shall see,
configuration of the nemes was described with precision in the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili a few years later. 90 But the first real evidence that we have that the
sphinxes on the Nile statues, for example, had been recognized as Egyptian
symbols comes only in 1527, when the Roman antiquarian Andrea Fulvio
described them as “animals peculiar to Egypt”. 91
89
See Anna Cavallaro, “Gli affreschi del Pinturicchio nella Palazzina di Giuliano della
Rovere ai SS. Apostoli”, in Un’Idea di Roma: Società, arte e cultura tra Umanesimo e
Rinascimento, ed. Laura Fortini, 53–71 (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1993).
90
See Curran, Renaissance, chapter 7.
91
Andrea Fulvio, Antiquitates Urbis Romae (Rome: Nuperrime aeditae, 1527), fol. Eiiir:
Item duo pari forma ingentia, marmoreaque fluviorum simulacra seminuda, quae
quantum ex rerum argumento deprehendi potest, Nili ac tigris flu. numina sunt.
Quorum Alterum Sphynga aegypti peculiare animal, cui cubito initit, habet,
Alterum vero tygride Armenie truculentam feram, na nilus aegypti. tygris vero
aremeniae flu. est. Aelianus scribit Nili simulacrum exprimi figura humana.
See R. O. Rubinstein, “The Renaissance Discovery of Antique River-God
Personifications”, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini, ed. Cristina De
Benedictis, 257–63 (Florence: Sansoni, 1984), for discussion.
48
In the case of Osiris’s pyramid-tomb, which appears in two different

configurations, we can be sure that the type was chosen primarily for its Egyptian
significance. But even here there is double reference to Egypt and Rome. For it is
clear that the basic form of these richly inlaid, gilded and jewel-encrusted
pyramids was copied from Filarete’s rendition of the Meta Romuli on the bronze
doors of St. Peter’s (fig. 19), with the addition of a small globe at the pinnacle (in
the Appearance scene) that inevitably suggests the Vatican obelisk. The
relationship to the Meta Romuli and, by extension, to Romulus, is made clear by
a slightly later description in the Antiquarie prospetiche romane, where the Meta is
described as having been encrusted with “fine gems”. 92
Taken together, this cluster of allusions to Romulus and Saint Peter (from the
Romulan pyramid) and to Saint Peter and Julius Caesar (courtesy of the Vatican
obelisk) invest Pinturicchio’s Osirian pyramids with a rich conglomeration of
historical and ideological associations that subtly underline the message of the
entire cycle: the advent of the Borgia represents the fulfillment of the Egyptian,
Romulan, and Christian foundations (and refoundations) of Rome. But there is a
final irony in this case, since it was Pope Alexander himself who ordered, just a
few years later in 1499, the demolition of the remaining vestiges of the Meta
Romuli to open his new Jubilee road in the Borgo, the Via Alessandrina. 93
The last – and for the Borgia, one presumes, the most important – Egyptianizing
element in Pinturicchio’s cycle is the image of Apis itself, since it is through this
heraldic and dynastic figure that the family’s connection to Osiris is established.
The laboring ancestors of the god appear as the laboring creatures in the
agricultural cycle on the north vault, which sets the stage for the first appearance
of the living god in the Appearance scene and the golden statues in the Procession
and St. Catherine scenes (figs. 12 and 17). The passage from beast of burden to
92
As noted by Fairbarn, North Italian Album, 44; original text in Antiquarie prospetiche
romane, ed. Giovanni Agosti and Dante Isella (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, Ugo
Guanda Editore; Biblioteca di scrittori italiani, 2004), 16, lines 157–58: “A front’ a llui
era d’equal alteza, / una gran meta di pietra murata / di gemme fine et di gran gentileza.”
93
See Pastor, History of the Popes, 6:166–68; Peebles, “‘Meta Romuli’”, 21–50; and
Eunice D. Howe, “Alexander VI, Pinturicchio and the Fabrication of the Via
Alessandrina in the Vatican Borgo”, in Henry A. Millon and Susan Scott Munshower,
An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque: Sojourns in and out of Italy;
Essays in Architectural History Presented to Helmut Hager on His Sixty-Sixth Birthday,
ed. Henry A. Millon and Susan Scott Munshower, 64–93, Papers in Art History from
the Pennsylvania State University, vol. 8, pts. 1 and 2, 2 vols. (University Park:
Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University, 1992), 1:64–93.
49
golden idol is clearly presented, and the allusion to the Golden Calf must surely
be intentional. In this case, however, the “idol of the Egyptians” is presented in
the most favorable terms possible – as the living hieroglyph of Osiris’s (and the
Borgia’s) civilizing rule. Indeed, the bull’s (and the Borgia’s) ultimate submission
to Christian authority is underlined in the marble frieze below, where a small
herd of sacrificial oxen is shown bowing before images of the Virgin, the cross,
and the pope himself. 94
Figure 20: Filippo Lippi, The Worship of the Golden Calf (Apis) (ca. 1500),
National Gallery, London; according to Curran, Renaissance, 118
A curious echo of this imagery may be observed in a contemporary work, the

second of two spalliera panels representing episodes from Exodus, attributed to
the Florentine painter Filippino Lippi and/or an assistant (sometimes called the
“Master of Memphis”) and now in the National Gallery, London (fig. 20). 95 The
panel, which dates to the later 1490s or early 1500s, illustrates the episode of the
Golden Calf, with the expected crowd of licentious revelers in the foreground
and the tents of the Israelite camp in the back, where a toppled figure of the calf
can also be glimpsed. But instead of the expected golden image, like the one that
appears in Cosimo Rosselli’s fresco of the same subject in the Sistine Chapel,
Lippi depicts the object of worship as an improbably airborne, living bull, marked
Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia” 184.

94
95
For the panels, see Patrizia Zambrano and Jonathan Katz Nelson, Filippino Lippi
(Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2004), 502–11, 602–4 (cat. no. 61).
50
as Apis by the crescent moon that appears on his shoulder. 96 Otto Kurz has
argued that the London panels were conceived at the same time as the Borgia
cycle, that is, at about the same time that Filippino was putting the last touches
on his frescoes in the Carafa Chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva. 97 Kurz also
discovered an unexpected literary source for Lippi’s aerodynamic Apis in one of
the great encyclopedic works of the later Middle Ages, the Historia Scholastica of
the French theological writer Petrus Comestor (1169–73). 98 In his commentary
on Exodus, Comestor writes that the Egyptians’ idolatrous reverence for this
beast was God’s punishment for their persecution of the Hebrews. He goes on to
provide some colorful details about Apis and his cult:
According to Pliny, who saw him himself, the Apis is a bull who used to rise
suddenly out of a river. Upon his right shoulder is the shape of the crescent moon.
When the Egyptians gathered around him with music and chanting he rose in the
air and moved above their heads, as if he were playing the cithara. When he
moved, people beneath followed his movements, and when he stood still, they
stood still as well [...] Some relate that he appeared every year at the feast of
Serapis, and this is believed to be the reason why he himself is called Serapis, i.e.,
sacred to Apis. 99
Comestor’s source for Apis’s aerial activities is unknown (it is not Pliny, as he
claims). 100 But should this panel be identified as a depiction of the “Worship of
the Apis”, as Kurz suggested, or as a representation of the Golden Calf
assimilated with Apis as an astrological (or demonic) being, as suggested by
Robert Eisler in a response to Kurz’s piece? 101 The two arguments would appear
to be a matter of emphasis rather than real dispute. In any event, one wonders for
whom these unlikely panels might have been painted. Someone in the Borgia
family, perhaps, or one of the families that entertained Osirian claims of descent,
96
The crescent-moon attribute is described by Ammianus 22.14.7; and Aelian 11.10–11.
For the Sistine fresco, See Carol F. Lewine, The Sistine Walls and the Roman Liturgy
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 60–64.
97
See Kurz, “Filippino Lippi’s ‘Worship of the Apis’”, 145–47.
98
Ibid., 146.
99
Comestor, Historia Scholastica, Liber Exodi, chap. 4, col. 1143, in Migne, Patrologia
Cursus Completus, vol. 198 (1855); translation from Kurz, “Filippino Lippi’s ‘Worship
of the Apis’”, 146.
100
Pliny, Natural History 8.71.185–86.
101
R. Eisler, “Apis or Golden Calf?”, Burlington Magazine 90 (1948): 58–59.
51
like the Colonna? Unfortunately, given the present state of research, this
question cannot be resolved here. 102
Returning to the Borgia frescoes, we must now consider the tricky problem of
sources. To begin with, it is clear that, whatever active and creative role he must
have played in conceiving of the visual forms here, Pinturicchio must have
worked in close consultation with that most shadowy and controversial of
collaborators, a “humanist adviser” (or advisers). 103 It is just not possible that the
painter could have known, let alone have interpreted in these very particular
ways, the esoteric and specialist literature upon which his cycle is based. As to
specifics, we have already noted that the most important source for the Osiris
story was Diodorus, whose Egyptian chapters were readily accessible in printed
editions of Poggio’s Latinization. 104 Indeed, the sequence of events in
Pinturicchio’s frescoes corresponds so closely to Diodorus’s narrative that they
can almost be said to “illustrate” his version of the story. Like Diodorus,
Pinturicchio emphasizes Osiris’s institution of the “peaceful arts” of agriculture,
including the ox-driven plow memorialized by Apis. 105 Pinturicchio’s
architectural fixtures, especially the golden thrones and shrines, may well have
been suggested by Diodorus’s report that Osiris built golden chapels in honor of
102
Kurz, “Filippino Lippi’s ‘Worship of the Apis’”, 147, suggested that the Apis theme
had become “topical” thanks to its promotion by Alexander VI. In the catalogue to the
recent Borgia exhibition in Rome, J. K. Nelson suggests that the image represents a
possible critique of the Borgia as idolatrous orgiasts; see Claudio Strinati, “Nell’ Italia dei
Borgia tra Quattroecto e Cinquecento”, in C. Alfano et al., I Borgia, 30–37, esp. 30. And
see Nelson, in Zambrano and Nelson, Filippino Lippi, 152–54, for the suggestion that
Apis’s crescent-shaped marking might allude to a family’s coat of arms.
103
For the controversy over these advisers, see Creighton Gilbert, trans., Italian Art
1400–1300: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), xix-
xxvii; Charles Hope, “Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian Renaissance”, in
Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, 293–343
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Ingrid D. Rowland, “The
Intellectual Background of the ‘School of Athens’”, in Raphael’s School of Athens, ed.
Marcia Hall, 131–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
104
For Diodorus as a major source for the cycle, see Giehlow, “Hieroglyphenkunde”, 40–
46; Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 182–87; Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297, 300ff; and
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 276–80.
105
Diodorus 1.14.1–4, 1.15.8–9, 1.17.1–2, 1.20.3–4, 1.88.4; cf. Parks, “Pinturicchio’s
‘Sala’”, 310–11nn38–39.
52
his parents, Zeus and Hera, and “made images of the gods and magnificent
golden chapels for their worship”. 106
If Diodorus was the most important single source, the testimony of other
authorities was almost certainly consulted as well. As Giehlow, Saxl, and others
have noted, the inscription on Osiris’ throne in the fruit-gathering scene (fig. 13)
is an abbreviation of Tibullus’s praise of Osiris in his elegy to the Triumph of
Messalla. 107 Staying with the Latin tradition, an allusion to the Isiac episode in
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses may be detected in the final scene with the shrine
bearers. We recall that after his restoration to human form, Lucius devotes
himself to service in the college of the pastophori, or shrine bearers, at the Temple
of Isis in Rome. 108 The implied reference to this college in the shrine-bearing
scene, with its figure marked as a Borgia ancestor, marks one more cleverly placed
reference to the Egyptian-Roman translatio. Less clear is the influence of
Plutarch, whose De Iside et Osiride contains a rich helping of Osirian content.
Plutarch’s theological and allegorizing approach to this material has proved
especially attractive to scholars seeking a Christological dimension in the passion
and “resurrection” of Osiris. 109 N. Randolph Parks has noted some of the more
convincing evidence for a Plutarchan source, including the placement of Osiris’s
burial scene before the campaign against Typhon, which follows the order in De
Iside et Osiride and inverts Diodorus’s sequence, the striped coloring of Apis, and
the mutilated figure in the Advent scene (fig. 11), which may represent the
castrated but still-living figure of Typhon as Plutarch describes him. 110 But while
elements of Plutarchan inspiration cannot be dismissed out of hand, it seems to
me that the allegorical and Platonizing implications laid out in his treatise are
largely absent here. These are magical and mythological events, to be sure. But the
principal interest throughout appears to be narrative, historical, and dynastic. It is
surely relevant in this regard that, as Parks has acknowledged, Plutarch’s Isiac
treatise had no “discernable influence” on the work of Annius of Viterbo, whose
fundamental importance for the Borgia frescoes is almost universally
106
Diodorus 1.14–15.5; Diodorus, ed. Oldfeather, 1:47–51.
107
Tibullus 1.7.29–32; cf. Giehlow, “Hieroglyphenkunde”, 45; Saxl, “Appartamento
Borgia”, 182n12; Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297, 311n39; and Mattiangeli, “Annio da
Viterbo”, 290.
108
Apuleius Metamorphoses 11.26–30; Apuleius, Metamorphoses, ed. Hanson, 2:347–59.
109
See especially Cieri Via, “Mito, allegoria e religione”, 90–96.
110
See Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297, 300, 311n39, 314nn58–59. For other authors
who accept a Plutarchan influence, see Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 186; and Poeschel,
Alexander Maximus, 171.
53
acknowledged. 111 Annius may well have been familiar with the De Iside, but he
never seems to mention it in his writings, a circumstance that may reflect his
uncertainty with the Greek (a conveniently authoritative Latinization of the
treatise was not yet available) or his innate hostility to the “mendacity” of Greek
historians in general.
For the scenes of Io’s bovine transformation and her translation into Egypt as
Isis, the principal source was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 112 But significant elements
could have drawn from a variety of other authors. Both Augustine and Isidore
ascribed the “invention” of Egyptian letters to Isis. 113 More recently, Giovanni
Boccaccio told the story with admirable clarity in his De Claris Mulieribus (On
Famous Women; circa 1361), where we read how Io, transformed into a cow to
protect her from the jealousy of Juno, was held captive by Argus until he was
killed by Mercury. Mercury drove her to Egypt, where she was restored to human
form and renamed Isis. Finding the Egyptians to be a primitive and
underdeveloped people, Isis taught them “how to till the soil, seed it, and finally
how to make food from grain”, and further gave them laws and alphabetic
letters. 114 To honor her for these great accomplishments, the Egyptians
considered her divine and made her their queen. She was married to Apis, who
was also considered a god by the Egyptians, and was also known as Osiris or
Serapis. After her death, “her divinity became so renowned and revered that at
Rome, already mistress of the world, a huge temple was accorded her, and every
year solemn sacrifices were held in the Egyptian manner”. 115
111
Parks, “Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297, 300, 311–12, notes the absence of any discernible
Plutarchan influence in Annius of Viterbo’s Antiquitates, a work whose affinity to the
Borgia frescoes is almost universally acknowledged.
112
Ovid Metamorphoses 1.567–779; see Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 280–283.
113
Augustine De civitate Dei 18.3, 37, 39; Isidore Etymologiae 8.11.84.
114
Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus, 8. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and
trans. Virginia Brown, I Tatti Renaissance Library 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 42–47. Boccaccio’s sources include Ovid, Eusebius, and
Hyginus’s Fabularum Liber, 145. See also Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum
gentilium libri, in Boccaccio, Opere, vols. 10–11, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: G. Laterza
& Figli, 1951), with numerous references.
115
Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus, 8.6; from Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans.
Brown, 47.
54
Annius of Viterbo and the Italian Osiris

In the frescoes of the Sala dei Santi, it may be said that the honors of Isis and
Osiris had been restored to Rome after a millennium or more of neglect. But
while Isis and her consort had been offered sacrifices and other cultic tribute in
the temples of the ancients, they return this time in a strictly subordinate
position, as forerunners and “hieroglyphic emblems” of the virtues and authority
of the Borgia pope. But who was the learned adviser responsible for this
incredibly intricate exercise in Egyptological erudition? As it turns out, the
identity of the leading suspect has been recognized for some time. And while it
must be admitted that there are no documents to tie him to the project, and that
the commission appears a bit “early” to show the influence by his fully developed
work, the correspondences are such that it seems indisputable that the basic
themes of the cycle were largely inspired by the “studies” of Giovanni Nanni,
better known as Annius of Viterbo (circa 1432/37–1502). 116 Annius, renowned,
condemned, and – I suspect – secretly admired by many as a consummate literary
and archaeological forger, is one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian
Renaissance. 117 A Dominican friar and student of theology who dabbled in
prophecy and astrology, Annius worked for some years in northern Italy, most
notably in Genoa, until he returned to Viterbo circa 1489–90 to take up an
appointment as a teacher and public lecturer for the town government. He
116
Annius’s influence on the cycle was proposed by Giehlow, “Hieroglyphenkunde”, 40–
46; and has been supported by most subsequent scholarship (Saxl, Parks, Mattiangeli,
Poeschel). A note of caution was struck recently by Rowland, Culture of the High
Renaissance, 58–59, who observed that the ancient sources were sufficient to provide the
basic elements, and that at the time that the ceiling was being painted, Annius was still
based in Viterbo. But Annius’s contact with the Borgia seems to have been initiated by
the fall of 1493, by which time his “Egyptological” work was well under way.
117
For Annius, see Roberto Weiss, “Traccia per una biografia di Annio da Viterbo”,
Italia medioevale e umanistica 5 (1962): 425–41; Walter Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus:
Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell
University, 1979); W. Stephens, “‘De historia gigantum’: Theological Anthropology
before Rabelais”, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and
Religion 40 (1984): 43–89; Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient
History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 58–138; C. R.
Ligota, “Annius of Viterbo and Historical Method”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 44–56; Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 48–49, 54–55, 60–
64, 100–118; A. Grafton, “Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention in
Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo”, in Grafton, Defenders of
the Text, 76–103; and Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance, 53–59.
55
labored mightily on a variety of historical and archaeological projects from the

early 1490s until 1498, when his magnum opus, the infamous Antiquitates, was
published in Rome. In 1499, he was appointed to the office of Magister Sacri
Palatii (Theologian to the Papal Court) by Alexander VI. 118 Among the services
that Annius presumably rendered to the Borgia pope was the composition of a
“mythological genealogy” that traced the pope’s origins to Egyptian ancestors: to
Osiris, in particular, and his son, the Libyan or “Egyptian” Hercules, killer of
giants and avenger of his father’s murder. The text of this genealogy does not
survive, but it probably resembled the Osirian genealogy that he composed for
Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese circa 1491. 119
Annius’s genealogies drew from the usual conglomeration of ancient and
medieval sources that professional scholars mined with such ingenuity to lineages
for their patrons. But he also had at his disposal a new collection of “ancient
texts”, which he almost certainly forged himself and published with his own
extensive commentaries in the aforementioned Antiquitates, whose full title,
Commentaria Fratri Joannis Annii Viterbiensis super opera diversorum auctorum
de Antiquitatibus Loquentium (Commentaries of Friar Giovanni Annius of
Viterbo on works of various authors discussing antiquities), gives a better sense of
the work’s epic scale and ambition. The first edition of 1498, which ran to more
than two hundred densely packed pages, was printed in Rome with the privilege
and authority of Alexander VI. The collection seems to have been an immediate
sensation, and saw numerous reprints and translations over the course of the next
118
See Weiss, “Traccia”, 425–36; and Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 265–75.
119
The text of the original treatise, De Viterbii viris et factis illustribis, is lost, but
references and fragments survive in the letters of the cardinal’s son, Alessandro Farnese,
and other sources. See A. Frugoni, ed., “Carteggio umanistico di Alessandro Farnese, dal
cod. GL. Kgl. S. 2125, Copenhagen”, Nuova collezione di testi umanistici inediti o rari 8
(1950): 61–64; Weiss, “An Unknown Epigraphic Tract by Annius of Viterbo”, in
Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent on His Retirement from the Chair of Italian at
Cambridge, ed. C. P. Brand, K. Foster, and U. Limentani, 102, 106n15 (Cambridge: W.
Heffer, 1962); Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 266–68; and Ingeborg Walter, “Il
presente come passato: Mito, storia e leggenda dei Farnese/Time Present and Time Past:
The Role of Myth, History and Legend in the Making of the Farnese Dynasty”, in La
dignità del casato: Il salotto dipinto di Palazzo Farnese, by Claudio Strinati and Ingeborg
Walter, 39–69, 91–118 (Rome: Elefante, 1995).
56
century. 120 Among the “rediscovered” texts that Annius claimed to have obtained
from a Mantuan friend and an Armenian colleague in Genoa were an epitome of
Berosus of Chaldea’s lost history of Assyria and Babylon, a copy of Manetho’s
Egyptian king list, and fragments by other authors from Rome, Greece, and
Persia. 121 Prominent among the latter were two short treatises by the Roman
historian Q. Fabius Pictor, which treat the foundation of Rome from the earliest
times, and include an account of the city’s foundation by the plow of Romulus. 122
From this collection of pseudoauthorities, and Berosus in particular, Annius
claimed to have discovered irrefutable proof that the earliest European
civilization of postdiluvian times had been established in Italy, and more
particularly on the future sites of Rome and his own native city of Viterbo.
Indeed, as has long been understood, the underlying motivation for all of
Annius’s work, including the appeal to Egyptian and other nonclassical sources
and traditions, was a political and nationalistic desire to undermine the claims to
historical and cultural primacy promulgated by the Greeks and their
contemporary admirers. That this agenda had a potentially significant appeal to
the interests of Annius’s own townsmen, to his fellow Dominicans and other
defenders of the Scholastic tradition, and more broadly to the temporal and
120
I have used the following editions: Commentaria Fratris Ioannis Annii Viterbensis
ordinis praedicator, theologiae professoris super opera diversorum auctorum de
Antiquitatibus loquentorum (Rome: Campo Florae, 1498); Antiquitatum variarum,
volumina XVII a venerando et praedictorii ordinis professore Ioanne Annio (Paris: Petit,
1515); and Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici (Antwerp, 1552, as in note 47). Also useful are the
early Italian translations by Pietro Lauro, I cinque libri de la antichita de Beroso [...] con lo
commento di Giovanni Annio da Viterbo, 2nd ed. (Venice: Baldassera Constantini, 1550);
and Francesco Sansovino, Le Antichità di Beroso caldeo sacerdote [...] et d’altri scrittori,
cosi hebrei, come greci, et latini, che trattano delle stesse materie (Venice: Presso A. Salicato,
1593). For a list of editions, see Stephens, Giants, 344–45 (app. 2).
121
For discussion of the texts and likely sources, see Stephens, “Berosus”, 25–155; E.
Fumagalli, “Un falso tardo-quattrocentesco: Lo pseudo-Catone di Annio da Viterbo”, in
Vestigia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, ed. Rino Avesani et al., 1:337–60 (Rome:
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984); Ligota, “Annius of Viterbo”, 44–56; Stephens,
Giants, 101–38; Grafton, “Invention of Traditions”, 80–93; and Rowland, Culture of the
High Renaissance, 55–59.
122
See Stephens, “Berosus”, 39; and Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity,
162–69, for discussion.
57
imperial aspirations of the papal state, must have seemed both obvious and
attractive to the industrious old friar. 123
Annius identifies the founder of his primordial, pre-Etruscan state as no less a
distinguished personage than Noah. As Berosus’s account tells it, Noah came to
Italy from Armenia in the year 108 after the Flood and established a colony on
the left bank of the Tiber, in the area later known as the Janiculan Hill and the
Vatican. 124 On this spot, Noah instructed the locals in the proper worship of
God, introduced them to the arts of agriculture and natural magic, and showed
them how to make wine, which inspired him to take a new name, Janus, which he
adapted from the Hebrew word for “wine”, yayin. 125 Returning to Italy again
years later, Noah established further outposts in the northern regions of Latium,
establishing his new capital in the town of Vetulonia (later Viterbo), which had
been founded some time before by his grandson, Comerus. Some time later, the
people of Vetulonia found themselves oppressed by a race of evil giants, until the
about 549 Post Diluvium, when the Egyptian king Osiris, also known as Apis
(and whom Annius identifies as a son of Noah’s least favorite offspring, Cham),
arrived to liberate them with the help of his son, Hercules the Egyptian (called
Hercules Libyus or Aegyptius). 126 Following the defeat of the giants, Osiris ruled
in Viterbo for ten years, reestablishing the rule of law and reeducating the people
123
For these themes, see F. N. Tigerstedt, “Ioannes Annius and Graecia Mendax”, in
Classical, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, ed.
Charles Henderson Jr., 2:293–310 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964).
124
The story is told in the Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica; see Annius, Commentaria [...],
fols. Nviiir-Yvr (pp. 197–301); and Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 35–209. See
Stephens, Giants, 111–35, for a useful summary of the main narrative.
125
According to Stephens, Annius derived his conflation of Janus and Noah from the
Genoese chronicle of the Dominican Jacobus da Voragine (1228/9–99); see Stephens,
Giants, 109–10; and Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian
Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–62. Jacobus attributed the
foundation of Genoa to Noah in his persona as Janus, and it seems more than likely that
Annius, as a Dominican resident for some years in Genoa, would have known this work.
Other sources, dating as far back as the twelfth century, describe Janus as a founder of
Rome and a son or grandson of Noah. These include the twelfth-thirteenth-century
Graphia Urbis Romae, and the Speculum regum of Godfrey of Viterbo (1125–92), who
supports his claims with reference to “Berosus”. See Stephens, “Berosus”, 76–89, 142–
46; Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 319–21; and Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of
Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1993), 87–90, for further discussion.
126
For Hercules Libyus/Aegyptus, see Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 67–75.
58
in the agricultural arts that had been introduced by Noah. He then returned to
Egypt, where he was overthrown and killed by his jealous brother, Typhon, who
had aligned himself with most of the surviving giants. Hercules and his mother,
Isis, began another war against Typhon and the other evil giants, and after
defeating their principal enemy, Hercules carried the battle into North Africa,
Spain, and Gaul and back into Italy, where he reigned for another thirty years. 127
As we see, Osiris is accorded a relatively late role in the early history of Viterbo
and Italy in the Antiquitates, but this is not the case in Annius’s earlier historical
treatise, Viterbiae historia epitoma, which was composed circa 1491 and
dedicated to Alexander VI’s predecessor, Pope Innocent VIII. 128 In this much
more summary history of Viterbo, the city’s foundation is attributed directly to
“the great Osiris Aegyptius”, the “first father, civilizer, and sovereign of the whole
barbarian world”, who crossed into Italy with his “third-born son Libyus, called
Hercules (the first-born of Isis)”, his nephew, Italus (called Atlas), and their
“close relative” Corynthus. Together, this group conquered the primitive tribes
of Italy and established a series of “civilized” colonies whose capital was Biturgion
(Viterbo). According to this version of Annius’s tale, Osiris left his Italian empire
in the hands of his nephew, Italus, and returned to Egypt, where he was
murdered by Typhon. To the aid of the now oppressed Italian colony came
Hercules Libyus, who defeated and killed Typhon; restored Isis and Osiris’ son,
Horus, to the throne; and pursued his uncle’s accomplices into Phoenicia before
moving on to Spain, Liguria, and other conquests. 129 So we see that according to
Annius’s original scheme, the origins of Viterbo and, by extension, of the earliest
Italian or Etruscan civilization was almost entirely Egyptian.
Osiris’s prominence in Annius’s original history was probably inspired, at least in
part, by the great interest in Egypt that erupted in the wake of Ficino’s Hermetica
translations. Indeed, the very form of the later Antiquitates, with its “ancient
texts” and extensive commentaries, seems to have been inspired by these
published works. To the reading public of the 1490s, the discovery of previously
lost or unknown texts remained a real possibility, and we can only admire
127
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 108–79; summarized by Giehlow,
“Hieroglyphenkunde”, 40–42; Stephens, “Berosus”, 25–35; and Stephens, Giants, 134–
35.
128
Annius, Viterbiae historia epitoma, MS Vat. lat. 6263, fols. 346r–371v; published with
Italian translation, introduction, and notes by G. Baffloni, in Baffoni and Mattiangeli,
Annio da Viterbo, 13–251.
129
Annius, Viterbiae historia epitoma, fols. 347–351v; Baffioni, in Baffioni and
Mattiangeli, Annio da Viterbo, 80–97.
59
Annius’s canny recognition of this “market” as a means to promote his own

dubious claims. To this end, our “editor” takes great care in his commentaries to
connect the evidence provided by his invented authors to passages from the
established authorities. Among the most frequently cited of these “authentic”
sources, especially as far as his Egyptian material is concerned, are Macrobius,
Pliny the Elder, Josephus, and Diodorus Siculus. 130 Annius, whose knowledge of
Greek appears to have been spotty, seems to have consulted Diodorus in Poggio
Bracciolini’s Latin translation, which had been printed by 1472. Indeed, this
edition seems to have been the crucial source for Annius’s Egyptological content,
and it is not exaggerating to assert that Annius inhaled much of his basic
narrative and methodology from the first five books of Diodorus’s history.
Texts and citations are all well and good, of course, but what marks Annius as a
truly original and audacious dissembler is the effort he devoted to providing his
historical theories with “archaeological” evidence in the form of inscriptions. The
majority of these seem to have been manufactured or commissioned by Annius
himself in the early 1490s, since his first description of them appears in a short
“epigraphic treatise”, De marmoreis Volturrhenis tabulis, which he composed
around 1492. 131 The treatise, which is addressed to the eight governing
magistrates of Viterbo, describes a series of marble tablets that Annius claimed to
have discovered during his perambulations in the city and its surrounding
regions. These include two so-called Libiscillan tablets, now lost, which Annius
claims were inscribed in “Etruscan letters”; a second pair of “Tables of Cybele”,
inscribed in Greek; a single tablet containing a decree of the Lombard king
Desiderius; and a final tablet that Annius describes as the “Herculean tablet of
130
For the influence of Josephus and especially Diodorus on Annius’s work, see Parks,
“Pinturicchio’s ‘Sala’”, 297, 300; Stephens, “Berosus”, 88–127; and Mattiangeli, “Annio
da Viterbo”, 274–78.
131
The De marmoreis manuscripts in the Vatican, MS Chigiano, I.V.168, fols. 32v–39r;
and MS Chigiano, I.VI.204, fols. 58r–62v, have been published with commentary by
Weiss, “An Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 101–20. For much of what follows, I am
indebted the excellent discussions in Stephens, “Berosus”, 163–76; and Amanda Collins,
“Renaissance Epigraphy and Its Legitimating Potential: Annius of Viterbo, Etruscan
Inscriptions, and the Origins of Civilization”, in The Afterlife of Inscriptions: Reusing,
Rediscovering, Reinventing, and Revitalizing Ancient Inscriptions, ed. Alison E. Cooley,
57–76, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, suppl. no. 75 (London: Institute of
Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2000).
60
Osiris”, whose figured images are “all sacred letters of the Egyptians, as Pliny
writes in book 35, chapter 8”. 132
Figure 21: The Columna Osiriana, Museo Civico, Viterbo. Author photograph
This final tablet (fig. 21) is the most significant for our interests. But a few words
concerning the other tablets would not be out of line, if only for the light they
might shed on the extremely problematic origins of the Osirian one. As noted,
Annius describes the first two tablets as having been carved in Etruscan letters, a
script whose decipherment had baffled his contemporaries, including, as we have
seen, Alberti. But Annius marches ahead with supreme confidence and provides
Latin translations for the short title of the first and a more extensive section of
the second, which he explains as a lapis incantatus, or “magical stone”. 133 Turning
to the Cybelline tablets, these are described, as noted, as having been carved in
Greek, but Annius is quick to note that they also contain elements of more
Archaic letters, which he calls Ararathean and Maeonic, respectively. As Amanda
Collins has shown in an erudite analysis of this material, both of these supposedly
132
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 114: “De ultima herculea Osiridis tabula [...]
quae sunt omnino egyptiae sacrae literae, ut Plinius scribit lib. xxxv cap. viii”. As Weiss
points out in his notes, 119–20n54, Annius gets the Pliny citation wrong; he probably
meant to refer to Pliny Natural History 36.14.
133
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 110–11; Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy”, 61,
63.
61
ancient scripts are basically the same, and they were introduced, it seems, to
support Annius’s larger claim that the script of the Etruscans derived from the
most ancient form of Hebrew. 134 Indeed, both of the tablets are presented as
Greek “translations” of earlier inscriptions in the more ancient script. The first,
now lost, describes the foundation of Viterbo by Janus and his son, Cameses, and
the construction of the city’s fortifications by Hercules the Egyptian. The
second, which survives to this day in Viterbo’s Museo Civico, provides an
account of the marriage of Cybele and the Etruscan king Iasius, at which event
their most distinguished guest, Isis, Queen of Egypt and widow of Osiris, baked
the very first bread. 135 The surviving Cybelline tablet has been described as
epigraphically unconvincing, since its Greek letters are carved in capitals of the
type favored in Byzantine liturgical manuscripts, and seldom if ever on inscribed
stones. 136 A similar slip appears on the so-called decree of Desiderius, which is
carved in a Beneventan script that had been used in manuscripts but never on
monumental inscriptions. 137
About a year after his first publication of the Viterbese tablets, Annius was
involved in yet another spectacular “discovery”, this time apparently the real
thing, at least in part. In the fall of 1493, at a time when Alexander VI was
visiting Viterbo, Annius was present at the (possibly orchestrated) discovery of
an Etruscan tomb in nearby Cipollaro that contained a group of figured
sarcophagi that he claimed to identify – from their Etruscan inscriptions – as
commemorative statues of the aforementioned Iasius, Cybele, and Isis. 138 It is
tempting to interpret this incident, which we know mostly from later accounts,
134
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 111–12; Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy”, 61,
69.
135
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 112; Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy”, 62–65.
For the history of the tablets in Viterbo’s civic collections, see Adriana Emiliozzi, Il
Museo Civico di Viterbo: Storia delle raccolte archeologiche, Musei e collezioni d’Etruria,
vol. 2 (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Centro di studio per l’archeologia
etrusco-italica, 1986), 19–36.
136
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 117–18nn36–37; and Collins, “Renaissance
Epigraphy”, 62–63.
137
See Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 118n44; Collins, “Renaissance Epigraphy”,
62–63; and Emiliozzi, Museo Civico, 19–24. Weiss attributes the carving of the tablets to
Annius himself.
138
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 341–68. An account of these events was published
by Santi Marmocchini, Dialogo in defensione della lingua Toscana (1544). For discussion,
see Stephens, “Berosus”, 155–63; Stephens, Giants, 135–36; Emiliozzi, Museo Civico,
21–28; and Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance, 56–57.
62
as Annius’s effort to establish his credibility with the new pope. 139 In any case, he
made sure to dedicate his preliminary study of the inscriptions to Alexander
through its title, the Borgiana lucubratio (Borgian Study). 140 The discovery of
Etruscan antiquities was far from unusual in this period. An Etruscan tomb
richly outfitted with gold, vases, and sarcophagi, found in Volterra in 1466, is
perhaps the most celebrated incident of this kind. 141 Discoveries such as this were
greeted by the inhabitants of central Italian towns like Volterra and Viterbo with
a distinct sense of “local” pride as tokens of the community’s revered ancestors. 142
Annius’s approach follows this model, but is distinguished by his claim to be able
to read Etruscan inscriptions. And though his work in this area was undoubtedly
skewed by his larger agenda, he seems to have made some real progress in his
study of Etruscan, as a number of recent scholars have noted. 143 That his readings
were accepted in Viterbo, at least, is demonstrated by the town government’s
decision to install the “statues” of Iasius et al. in the Palazzo dei Priori in 1494–
95. Some half a century later, they attracted the admiration of Vasari, who cited
139
The Spanish jurist and prelate Antonio Agustín (1517–86) tells a somewhat similar
story about Annius. It seems that the wily Dominican had some of his fakes buried in a
vineyard near Viterbo, at a place where some plowing was due to begin. He then showed
up on the scene, claiming that his research had revealed that an ancient temple had once
stood on this spot, and directed the workmen to the spot. See Antonio Agustín, Dialoghi
di Don Antonio Agostini [...] intorno alle medaglie, inscrittioni, et altre antichità, ed.
Dionigi Ottaviano Sada (Rome: Guglielmo Faciotto, 1592), 290–91.
140
The treatise has been edited by Olof August Danielsson, Etruskische Inschriften in
handschriftlicher Überlieferung, Skrifter utgivna av K. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-
Samfundet i Uppsala, vol. 25, no. 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1928), 13–29.
141
See John R. Spencer, “Volterra, 1466”, Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 95–96.
142
For Etruscan “archaeology” in the Renaissance, see Chastel, “L’ ‘Etruscan Revival’ du
XVe siècle”; Weiss, “Renaissance Discovery”, 119–20; Cipriani, Il mito etrusco nel
Rinascimento fiorentino; de Grummond, “Rediscovery”, in Etruscan Life and Afterlife, ed.
Bonfante, 18–46; and Ingrid Rowland, “L’ ‘Historia Porsennae’ e la conoscenza degli
Etruschi nel rinascimento”, Studi umanistici piceni 9 (1989): 185–93.
143
For more on Annius’s Etruscan studies, see Stephens, “Berosus”, 170–94; W.
Stephens, “The Etruscans and Ancient Theology in Annius of Viterbo”, in Umanesimo a
Roma nel Quattrocento, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Maristella De Panizza Lorch, 309–22
(Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani; New York: Barnard College/Columbia University,
1984); Emiliozzi, Museo Civico, 26–27; and Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance,
56–57.
63
them as evidence of the advanced state of the arts among the ancient people of
Etruria. 144
Annius’s account of the “Herculean tablet” (fig. 21) in De marmoreis
Volturrhenis tabulis is comparatively brief. He reports that it had been placed by
“our ancestors” on the front of the rostrum (pulpit) of Viterbo’s cathedral, which
he identifies as the site of an ancient castrum (fortress) of Hercules. 145 After
identifying the images on the tablet as “Egyptian sacred letters”, he describes
them in some detail, including the portrait heads of a bearded man and a nymph
at the top left and right, and the birds, oak tree, and salamander on the lunette-
shaped panel below. But he provides no further explanation of the meaning of
“what they signify and in what manner they are to be read”, deferring this to a
future study that he calls the Lucubrationes (Studies), where he will prove that
they commemorate the founding of colonies in the Viterbo area by Osiris and
Isis. 146
The Lucubrationes never seems to have appeared as such, but presumably formed
the foundation for the expanded account of that which appears in the
Instititutiones Anniae in the Antiquitates. 147 In this version, the erstwhile “tablet”
is referred to throughout as the Columna Osiriana, presumably to conform more
closely to Diodorus’s description of the columns raised by Osiris in antiquity. 148
Deferring our analysis of the monument’s actual character for a moment, let us
consider a representative passage here, since it contains not only a description of
the piece, but a portion of Annius’s exhaustive (and somewhat repetitive)
translation of its “hieroglyphic” message. He begins, as we see in the epigraph at
the beginning of this chapter, with a slightly modified description of the tablet’s
findspot and a proclamation of the “column” as “the monument of Osiris’
triumph”, inscribed in “sacred Egyptian letters”. He then proceeds to identify its
imagery with reference to some ancient authorities:
144
Vasari, Vite, ed. Milanesi, 1.220–21.
145
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 114: “Hanc ultima tabulam appelavi herculeam
in lucubrationibus nostris, quia in Catro Herculis in ecclesia metropolitana pro rostris
posuerunt eam nostri maiores.”
146
Ibid., 115: “Quid haec signent et quomodo legantur, in nostris lucubrationibus etiam
provabimus.”
147
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 331–90.
148
Ibid., 380–90. The major sources for Osiris’s “pillars” are Diodorus 1.19.20 and
Herodotus 2.102–10, although Annius cites only Diodorus.
64
And Pliny, in his Natural History says that these images that you see are Egyptian
sacred letters. Therefore, on this column there is a space, in the middle of which is
the trunk of an oak tree, resembling a compounded scepter, the tops of whose
branches form the image of an eye. These images are particular to Osiris, as
Xenophon affirms. Both he and Macrobius, in the first book of the Saturnalia,
confirm this, saying that to express Osiris in the sacred letters they carved a
scepter, and they [also] represented him with the image of an eye. And by this sign
they showed Osiris. Moreover, they placed on this tree trunk not one but many
scepters, because he ruled not only one, but every part of the world, as Diodorus
writes.
Therefore, these [...] effigies are read in this fashion: “I am Osiris the king, who
was called against by the Italians and hastened to fight against the oppressors of
the Italian dominion [...] I am Osiris, who taught the Italians to plow, to sow, to
prune, to cultivate the wine, gather grapes, and make wine, and I left behind for
them my two nephews, as guardians of the realm from land and sea”. 149
Turning from the text to the tablet itself, which is preserved along with some
other Annian “antiquities” in the Museo Civico of Viterbo (fig. 21), this
description seems to stretch our credibility to the breaking point. Indeed, modern
scholars have long recognized that Annius’s “Osirian column” is an assemblage of
two distinct – and decidedly un-Egyptian and post-antique – elements. The
central section is a late twelfth- or thirteenth-century marble lunette, whose relief
decoration includes the tree, birds, nests, and salamander that Annius identifies as
the hieroglyphs of Osiris, his allies, and his enemies (more on these details below).
This lunette is set rather awkwardly into the second component – a rectangular
marble frame that has been assembled from several fragments, and which
includes, in its upper corners, the profile heads that Annius identifies as portraits
149
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 380: “Et Plinius in Naturali Historia has inquit
quae vides effigies. Aegyptiae sacrae literae sunt. In hac itaque columna est spatium, in
cuius medio est truncus et arboris quercus instar sceptri multiplicis, in quorum
sceptrorum summo duo rami circulum faciunt instar sceptri multiplicis, quae effigies est
propria Osiridis, ut ait Xenophon. Quod & Macrobius in primo Saturnalia confirmat,
dicens, Osirim exprimentes Aegyptii sacris literis insculpunt sceptrum, inque eo speciem
oculi exprimunt, et hos signo monstrant Osirim. Ponuntur autem in hoc trunco arboris
non unum, sed plura sceptra, quia non in una, sed omni parte orbis imperavit, ut
Diodorus scribit [...]”; 389–90: “Sum Osiris rex, qui evocatus ab Italis contra oppressores
Italici imperii festinus occurri, [...] Sum Osiris, qui docui Italos arare, serere, putare,
vinitare, vindemiare et vinum conficere et eis duos reliqui custodes imperii mari et terra
nepotes meos.”
65
of Osiris and his female cousin, “Sais Xantho, Muse of Egypt”. 150 The date of this
frame is uncertain. It could be a late medieval or early quattrocento concoction
that has produced for the tablet’s installation on the pulpit in Viterbo’s cathedral.
A pair of profile heads of a broadly similar type can still be seen on a marble ambo
in the Duomo of Ravello, and these have been dated as early as 1272. 151 But most
observers are content to agree with Roberto Weiss’s assertion that the heads were
“made during the second half of the fifteenth century, when the lunette was
probably inserted into [the frame]”. 152 The implication that Annius had the
heads manufactured himself cannot be proved, but even if this was the case, the
Columna would have to be classified as a kind of “assisted readymade”, and not as
an out-and-out forgery, like some of his other “finds.” As for the lunette itself, I
am inclined to agree with Weiss that it was Annius’s “imagination” that saw
hieroglyphs on it, and, at most, saw fit to enhance the impact of his “discovery”
with some newly produced “portraits”. 153
However unlikely it may appear to modern observers, it is clear that in Viterbo,
at least, the tablet’s authenticity was accepted enthusiastically by the civil
authorities, who made sure that it was preserved and displayed along with the rest
of the Annian “antiquities”. Indeed, as late as the 1580s, the Columna was
installed with the other Annian tablets in the Viterbo’s Palazzo Comunale, where
it was provided with a Latin translation for the benefit of the unenlightened
spectator:
OSIRIDIS VICTORIAM IN GIGANTES LITTERIS HIEROGLYPHICIS IN
HOC ANTIQUISSIMO MARMORE INSCRIPTAM EX HERCULIS OLIM
NUNC DIVI LAURENTII TEMPLO TRANSLATAM AD
150
Ibid., 387. For the tablet and its original components, see Italo Faldi, Museo Civico di
Viterbo, dipinti e sculture dal medioevo al XVIII secolo (Viterbo: Agnesotti, 1955), 60–61
(cat. no. 38); Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 119n53; Mattiangeli, “Annio da
Viterbo”, 297–98; Emiliozzi, Museo Civico, 29–31; and Collins, “Renaissance
Epigraphy”, 67–68.
151
For the Ravello heads, see Carla Guglielmi Faldi, Il Duomo di Ravello (Torino: Cassa
di Risparmio di Torino, 1975), 5, fig. 1.
152
Weiss, “Unknown Epigraphic Tract”, 119n53.
153
The recent restoration of the tablet has revealed that a piece of the frame – the
material is marble, possibly from Carrara – bears a fragment of Hebrew inscription,
which most likely came from a Jewish tombstone in the area. This confirms the
impression of an assemblage, but does not clarify the problem of Annius’s involvement in
its manufacture.
66
CONSERVAN[DA] VETUSTISS[IMAE] PATRIAE MONUMENTA

ATQUE DECORA HIC LOCANDUM STAUIT S. P. Q. V.
[The Senate and People of Viterbo have erected here this very ancient marble,
inscribed with hieroglyphs about the victory of Osiris against the Giants, in this
temple, at one time dedicated to Hercules and now dedicated to Saint Lawrence,
in order to preserve the monuments and glory of our very ancient fatherland.]154
Returning to the 1498 text, it becomes clear that Annius’s entire reading
proceeds from his central interpretation of the oak tree in the lunette as a
disguised representation of a scepter – or more specifically, a set of several
compounded scepters – whose upper branches assume, in his reading, the shape
of an eye – thus forming the hieroglyph for Osiris as described by Macrobius in
the Saturnalia. 155 The rest of his “decipherment” draws from a variety of sources,
real and supposed, including Lactantius, Tibullus, Pliny the Elder, and especially
Diodorus, whose description of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Isis and Osiris at
Nysa provides the model for Annius’s “translations” here. 156 Indeed, Annius’s
sentences, and his use of the opening phrase “Ego sum Osiris” in particular, echo
precisely the construction employed in Poggio Bracciolini’s recently printed
Latinized edition. 157 Underlining the point, Annius cites these very passages in
support of his own reading:
154
The inscription was added when the tablet was moved from the Duomo to the
Palazzo dei Priori of Viterbo in 1581–87. See Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 296–
302; and Emiliozzi, Museo Civico, 19–36.
155
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 380–90, citing Macrobius Saturnalia 1.21.12, but
not, significantly, Plutarch De Iside et Osiride 10 (354f–355a) and 51 (371e) on this
point.
156
See epigraph at the beginning of chapter 1 in Curran, Renaissance.
157
Diodorus 1.27.3–6. For the model, see Poggio, Diodori Siculi Historiarum priscarum
libri VI a Poggio in Latinum Traducti (Venice: Andrea[m] Iacobi Kathare[n]sem, 1476),
fol. P.12v:
Ego Isis sum Aegypti regina a Mercurio erudita; quae ego legibus statui, nullus
solvet. Ego sum [mater] Osiridis. Ego sum prima frugum inventrix. Ego sum Ori
regis mater. Ego sum in altro canis refulgens. Mihi bubastia urbs condita est.
Gaude gaude Aegypte: quae me nutristi. In columna Osiridis haec scripta
dicuntur. Mihi pater Saturnus deor(um) omnium iunior. Sum vero Osiridis rex
qui universum peragravi orbem usque; ad desertos indorum fines. Ad eos quoque
perfectus sum: qui arcto subiacet usque ad histri fontes [...].
For analysis, see Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 297–302; and Stephens, “Berosus”,
167–70.
67
And [Diodorus] says in his first and second books, that [Osiris] ruled justly in
Egypt, and set forth with great arms and armies, more for the benefit of the entire
human race than for war. And so the following is written on a column in Egypt, as
Diodorus recounts: “I am Osiris the king, and there is no place in the world to
which I have not come, dispensing the things of which I was the inventor.”
[Among these inventions] was certainly the domestication of the bull to the plow,
hence he has for one of his names, Apis. Therefore, the Egyptians called the bull
Apis, and the sacred and divine bull Set Apis. 158
Since the reader’s acceptance of Annius’s reading is obviously predicated on this
resemblance, it is interesting to note that the Diodoran “translations” were
considered genuine enough to be excerpted in one of the first epigraphic
publications of the next century. 159 But the good friar’s translation of the other
images on the tablet – the birds, bird’s nests, twisting grapevines and salamander,
and the heads of Osiris and Sais Xantho – appear to be drawn almost entirely
from his own imagination:
What is the writing that is carved on this Osirian column, and what is its order
and significance? The answer is that this tablet contains three sacred letters of
Osiris, and one of Sais Xantho. Secondly, it contains the hieroglyphs of the Giants
overwhelming the kingdom of Italy, and of the Italians calling upon Osiris and of
Osiris coming to their aid. Thirdly, there are the hieroglyphs of the settled and
liberated Italy. There are, moreover, three hieroglyphs of Osiris: one denoting his
universal and lawful empire, another of his journey in Vetulonia [Viterbo] in the
company of Sais Xantho, and a third with the sign of himself united with his wife
Isis-Ceres. The tree-trunk in the form of a scepter, whose upper branches form the
image of an eye, signifies his just kingdom, as we have explained above. Since one
scepter represents each of his realms, so many scepters represent the many parts of
his empire all over the world [...] The second hieroglyph of Osiris is the head,
158
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 382:
Et ut ait in primo & secundo libro, iuste imperavit Aegypto, & maximis copiis et
exercitu profectus est ad beneficentiam humani generis magis quam ad bellum.
Unde in columna Aegyptia, ut author est Diodorus, scriptum est. Sum Osiris rex,
qui universum peragravi orbem, nec fuit in orbe locus quem non adiverim, docens
ea, quorum inventor fui, scilicet tauros domesticare ad aratrum, unde Apis unum
ex cognominibus habuit. Apim enim & Set Apim Aegyptii taurum & sacrum
divumque taurum dicunt.
159
See Petrus Appianus, Inscriptiones Sacrosanctae Vetustatis, Non illae Quidem Romanae,
sed Totius fere orbis summo studio ac maximis impensis Terra Marique conquisitae feliciter
incipiunt (Ingolstadt: P. Apiani, 1534), cxxxvi.
68
facing right, with semi-long hair, which signifies his setting forth and journey, as
shown above. This head of a long-haired man, moreover, is on the outside, and
also above the tree on the left. This signifies Osiris setting forth on his journey
outside Italy. The third of his sacred letters is the Calathus, in which are placed
baby chicks. 160
After identifying the baby chicks as symbols of Osiris’s instruction of the Italians
in the arts of agriculture, Annius proceeds to explain the salamander as the
symbol of the giants who enslaved the peoples of ancient Italy:
For the calling of him against the Giants, there are also three hieroglyphs. A
serpent or crocodile-dragon occupies the base of the scepter. And the dragon
signifies evil, as Diodorus says in his fourth book. Therefore, because this evil is on
the scepter, it surely portends the tyrants laying hold of the realm of Italy. The
second figure is of open-mouthed birds in their own nest. Their own nest signifies
their own country, and the open mouth designates a crying out, a calling, even a
speaking, as Xenophon says. There are, moreover, two nests, one on the right and
one on the left. Therefore the birds calling out in their own nest are the Italians
calling forth and beseeching for the aid of Osiris from both parts of Italy. 161
160
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 387–88:
Quaeritur, quali scriptura sit excisa haec Osiriana columna, & quis ordo &
significata. Respondetur quod haec tabula continet tres literas sacras Osiridis &
unam Sais Xantho. Secondo continet literae sacrae gigantum opprimentium
imperium Italiae et Italicorum evocantium, & festinantis auxilii. Tertia literas
sacras compositae ac liberatae Italiae. Tres autem literas sacras Osiridis sunt, una
universalis imperii iusti, alia peregrationis in Vetulonia, cum societate Sais
Xantho. Tertio cum insigni sibi & Cereri Isidi coniugi communi. Signum autem
imperii iusti est truncus instar sceptri, & in sumitate rami circunuoluti instar
oculi, ut supra exposuimus. Unum autem sceptrum, unius partis imperium in orbe
significat. Ergo plura sceptra, plurium in orbe partium [...] Secunda litera sacra
Osiridis est caput, facie dextra semicrinita, quae ilium in profectione existentem
significat & peregrinantem, ut supra probavimus. Hic autem extra atque, super
arborem a sinistris est caput viri semifacie crinita. Quare Osirim in
pe[re]grinatione atque profectione & extra Italiam significat. Tertia eius litera
sacra est Calathus, in quo consistunt pulli.
161
Ibid., 388:
69
Annius concludes by explaining the sparrows that feed the baby chicks in their
nests as signs of Osiris and Hercules answering the call of the Italians, and the
pair of larger birds as sparrow hawks that stand for Osiris’s nephews Lestrigon
and Phorcus, who were left in Italy to “guard the kingdom from attack from land
and sea”. 162
I have treated Annius’s “translation” at some length for a variety of reasons, but
most of all to call attention to its status as the first published exercise in the
decipherment of a (purported) hieroglyphic inscription in post-antique times. If
this is in fact the case, it could be said that the discipline of philological
Egyptology began with an act of willful misidentification, hallucination, or
outright fraud. In the end, it all depends on how sympathetically one wishes to
categorize the “methods” of its author. But what of Annius’s audience? Surely
they must have recognized this odd little stone as a work of local and manifestly
non-Egyptian manufacture. Or did they? We must remember that at this stage of
the “revival of antiquity”, let alone hieroglyphic study, the classification of
monuments had barely begun to reach the level of systematic classification that it
would obtain a mere half century later. And in Annius’s defense, we should
acknowledge that he does not describe the Columna as a pharaonic import, like
the obelisks in Rome were known to be. The tablet in Viterbo is assumed to be
something much older than these already ancient monuments, fashioned close to
the beginning of post-Deluvian history by Annius’s Etruscan “ancestors” using
local materials and techniques. Indeed, in what appears to be a moment of
unexpected reticence, Annius even concedes the possibility that the surviving
Columna might be a later replacement or copy of a much older original. But this
possibility, he insists, does nothing to undermine its “infallible proof” for Osiris’s
liberation of Italy. 163 In the end, what distinguishes Annius from his
Nunc de evocatione eius contra gigantes, tres sacrae effigies sunt. Serpens aut
Crocodilus Draco iam initia sceptri occupans una. Draco malum significat, ut
Diodorus in quarto libro dicit. Ergo quoniam hoc malum in sceptro est, utique
tyrannos occupantes Italiae imperium portendit. Aves in proprio nido aperto ore,
sunt secunda effigies. Proprius nidus propriam patriam significat, & os apertum
clamorem et vocationem, autem locutionem annotat, ut ait Xenophon. Sunt
autem duo nidi altera a dextris altera a sinistris. Ergo aves istae clamantes in
proprio nido sunt Itali evocantes et implorantes auxilium Osiridis: ab utraque
parte Italiae [...].
162
Ibid., 388–90.
163
Ibid., 390:
70
contemporaries is his willingness to put the oft-proclaimed universal legibility of

the hieroglyphs to the test. He must have felt secure enough that his reading
could not be seriously questioned; and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine who
among his contemporaries might have been in a position to challenge his
interpretation, although, as we shall see, not everyone was willing to be
convinced.
As previously noted, Annius had something of a sideline as a genealogist, in
which capacity he provided an Osirian lineage for the “Viterbese” Farnese family.
If, as is widely assumed, he provided a similar genealogy for Alexander VI and the
Borgia, all literary traces of it seem to have vanished. But, as a number of scholars
have observed over the years, the basic structure of a Borgian-Annian genealogy
can be extrapolated from the pages of the Antiquitates. 164 Indeed, Annius’s entire
enterprise could be described as genealogical, devoted as it is to tracing the origins
and relations of the various postdiluvian kings and linking them to the prehistory
of his native region. The connection between Annius’s ancient worthies and the
bloodlines of his noble patrons is not always evident to the modern reader, but
the method is fully in keeping with a whole genre of mytho-historical genealogies
that flourished in this period. For few indeed were the noble dynasties of Europe
who were not open and accustomed to promoting their legitimacy through
Quo verò tempore haec tabella fuerit excisa patet quod primum sub Osiride. An
vero haec illa sit, an ei vetustate labenti, ad eius exemplar suffecta, nondum
compertum habemus. Existimamus tamen eandem permanere. Sed quisque
opinetur ut volet. Sat est infallibiliter hanc tenere Osirim et eius in Italiam
expeditionem.
164
See Giehlow, “Hieroglyphenkunde”, 44–46; Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia”, 183–88;
Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 260–69; and Poeschel, AlexanderMaximus, 165–76.
71
claims of descent from ancient heroes, princes, and gods. 165 During the
quattrocento, discourses on the mythical ancestors of great men and noble
families became standard elements in the funeral orations and other works
composed by sycophantic humanists. 166 Using this method, even the relatively
humbly born could claim some sort of noble ancestry. Annius himself claimed to
descend from the line of the emperors Antoninus Pius and Commodus. 167
But for the more distinguished families, like the Borgia or the Colonna, descent
from a mortal Roman emperor was apparently deemed inadequate. Better to
trace your family’s origins even further back, to a legendary hero or god like
Aeneas or Hercules. Annius’s Osirian and “Egyptological” spin appears to be an
innovation in this field, but given the incomplete state of our present knowledge,
we cannot be certain that he was not exploiting an already established Roman
tradition. In any event, his “historical” genealogies provided a fertile source for
the elaboration of such genealogies well into the sixteenth century. 168
165
For the ancient roots of this practice, see E. J. Bickerman, “Origines gentium”,
Classical Philology 47 (1952): 65–81. For the medieval and Renaissance periods, see
Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, 19–26; A. E. Asher, “Myth, Legend and History in
Renaissance France”, Studi francesi 39 (1969): 409–19; Frank L. Borchardt, German
Antiquity and Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); R. Howard
Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Roberto Bizzocchi, “‘Familae Romanae’
Antiche e Moderne”, Rivista storica Italiana 103 (1991): 355–97; Tanner, Last
Descendant of Aeneas; and Roberto Bizzocchi, Genealogie incredibili: Scritti di storia nell’
Europa moderna, Annali dell’ Istituto storico italo-germanico, Monografia, vol. 22
(Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1995). For general discussion, see Peter G.
Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from
Antiquity to the Modern Age, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 59 (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1994).
166
John M. McManamon, SJ, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian
Humanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 45–49, provides an
excellent discussion of these orations.
167
Annius, Antiquitatum variarum, fol. 162v; cited by Weiss, “Traccia”, 425n3.
168
The Strozzi of Florence staked their claim of descent from Hercules Libyus on the
evidence provided by Berosus in the Antiquitates; see Sansovino, Antichità di Beroso
caldeo, 2r–v; and Roberto Bizzocchi, “Struttura familiare e memoria storica”, in Palazzo
Strozzi: Metà millennio 1489–1989, ed. Daniela Lamberini, 92–107 (Rome: Istituto
della Enciclopedia italiana, 1989).
72
For further evidence of an Annian Borgia genealogy, we need only turn to the
imagery of Pinturicchio’s frescoes. 169 For example, the initials of Alexander VI
(AL. VI) that appear on the pediment of Osiris’s throne in the fruit-gathering
scene (fig. 13) establish a direct connection between the Egyptian king and his
contemporary “descendant”. 170 The clever juxtaposition of Apis and his forebears
with the Borgia motto, Pacis Cultori, and the juxtaposition of Hercules and Apis
in the final scene provide further evidence for the dynastic meaning of the cycle as
a whole. Other details identified by Paola Mattiangeli appear to provide direct
references to the Columna Osiriana. These include a medallion with male and
female profile heads that appears on the marble frieze of the Sala dei Santi and
the stucco bird’s nests supported by winding tendrils that frame one of the scenes
on the central arch. 171
Turning from the visual to some textual evidence, we note that Annius dedicated
the first edition of his Antiquitates to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for whose
interest he devised a genealogy of the first rulers of “Hispania” that conveniently
established Hercules Aegyptius-Libyus as the founder of the Spanish royal line. 172
This same genealogy could be readily applied to Alexander and the Borgia, since,
as self-proclaimed cousins of the house of Aragon, they could lay claim to the
same lineage. We can only assume that this argument was presented to them with
suitable gravity and auctoritas by Annius of Viterbo, theologian, historian,
Etruscologist, hieroglyph expert, and master of genealogies ancient and modern.
As the calendar raced toward the fateful year of 1500 it may have seemed, to both
Annius and Alexander, that a new “Alexandrian” golden age was at hand.
As it turned out, however, both patron and courtier lived only briefly into the
new century. Annius died in Rome in 1502, a victim, some believe, of the
poisonous proclivities of the Borgia, although another report, identified by Ingrid
Rowland, claims that he died raving in a straitjacket of chains. 173 He was buried
in the Dominican Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, a building that had been
erected over the remains of the Roman Temple of Isis, where the rituals described
by Boccaccio and Apuleius took place, and where so many Egyptian antiquities
169
See Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo”, 260–308, for the most cogent arguments on this
point.
170
Ibid., 290.
171
See Ibid., 302–3, plates 12 and 14.
172
Annius, Berosi sacerdotis chaldaici, 290–307, esp. 299–300. For discussion, see
Stephens, “Berosus”, 44–46; and Stephens, Giants, 134–38.
173
See Weiss, “Traccia”, 436 (poisoning); Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance, 54
(madness).
73
have been discovered over the years. We can imagine Annius’s appreciation, along
with a touch of déjà-vu, if he could have lived to have read the inscription on the
base of the little obelisk that was found in the gardens of the convent in 1665 and
erected in front of the church, on the back of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s elephant,
by his patron’s successor and namesake, Alexander VII (fig. 22):
In the year of Salvation 1667, Alexander VII dedicated to Divine Wisdom this
ancient Egyptian obelisk, a monument of Egyptian Pallas, torn from the earth and
erected in what was formerly the forum of Minerva, and now that of the Virgin
who gave birth to God. 174
Figure 22: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Obelisk and Elephant (1666–67)

with obelisk of Apries (Minervan obelisk, 589–570 BC). Piazza
di S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome.
174
Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, I:97n4.
74

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Aegyptiaca.

Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt

The Egyptian Renaissance

Adriani’s discussion is both enthusiastic and revealing enough to provide a fitting

For a visual demonstration of the integration of Egyptian elements into the

Figure 3: Francisco de Hollanda, Sphinx of Achoris (ca. 1538–40/63),

Given these traditional associations […] it is hardly surprising to find the

Figure 6: Monte Cavallo/Capitoline Nile (Roman imperial),

If Hollanda’s Allegory provides a compelling illustration of the integration of

We cannot be certain as to the precise sequence of events or processes that

Figure 9: Francisco de Hollanda, Sphinx of Achoris (ca. 1538–40/63),

One by-product of the Egyptomania concept is the continuing subordination of

throughout the eighteenth century. 37 The Egyptianizing creations of Piranesi,

of these studies capture the powerful sense of continuity that a spectator

developments with an account of the early humanists’ “recognition” of the

reading draws extensively on unedited or overlooked sources, and may contain

Egyptian Idols in the Palace of the Popes

Sabine Poeschel, Alexander Maximus: Das Bildprogramm des Appartamento Borgia im

Figure 10: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Myth of Isis and Osiris (1492–94),

Figure 12: Bernardino Pinturicchio, Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1492–

of Io by Jupiter; her transformation into a cow protected by Argus; Mercury

LEGERE POMA AB ARBORIBUS DOCUIT

SUSCEPTO REGNO DOCUIT EGIPTIACOS ARARE E(T) PRO DEO

the pomerium, a contracted form of “post-murum”, “behind” or “next to the

compartment, Osiris is murdered and dismembered by his jealous brother,

Although Pinturicchio’s frescoes treat such potentially disturbing themes as

In the case of Osiris’s pyramid-tomb, which appears in two different

A curious echo of this imagery may be observed in a contemporary work, the

Saxl, “Appartamento Borgia” 184.

Annius of Viterbo and the Italian Osiris

labored mightily on a variety of historical and archaeological projects from the

Annius’s canny recognition of this “market” as a means to promote his own

CONSERVAN[DA] VETUSTISS[IMAE] PATRIAE MONUMENTA

contemporaries is his willingness to put the oft-proclaimed universal legibility of

Figure 22: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Obelisk and Elephant (1666–67)

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